In reply to engine (msg # 28):

I like that you are trying to establish roots with this game and meaning beyond go fight monsters. I would participate for sure. Now, i know you don’t prefer maps, but is that just for combat or would you refrain from using a map to visualize the town?

In reply to jkeogh (msg # 29):

Thanks. I find I'm tired of characters coming to a town and being expected to save it when they have no real connection to it.

I myself probably wouldn't bother drawing a map. For one thing, I have no particular skill with it. For another, I tend to find maps overly restricting; every situation that arises has to be considered in terms of relative locations and lines of sight and how far sound might travel, etc. It's hard for me to see an upside, though I'm open to the idea that there is some.

I'd be willing to have a post or a thread that detailed the town to a degree, stating what is in it, and maybe some relative positions, e.g. the keep is being constructed in the middle of town, next to the street with the temples on it, which is on the other side of town from the thieves quarter.

My post in the main Game Proposals thread landed with a thud and I can't bump that post. Do you think I should just launch the game so I can bump a Player's Wanted post?

Yes. I never saw your post in the Game Proposals thread.

In reply to jkeogh (msg # 31):

I made it yesterday. It's still near the top.

Okay, I'll think about just launching the game. Thanks.

Just a bit of a warning, but in my experience the campaigns that are based on the concept of defending a home tend to need more plot intervention from the GAM rather than less. It runs into the problem that Star Trek had with DS9... it's easy to explain conflict when the heroes are going out into the unknown, but it's harder to justify the adventure when the heroes sit at home waiting for the adventure to come to them.

In reply to Godzfirefly (msg # 33):

Thanks for the advice. My thought was that the threats that "come to" the town would generally be ones that the PCs can't solve on site. While there might be some need to defend it from direct attack, if something is undermining the town buildings, turning the well water to stinking slime, or causing all the icons in the temples to turn black and weep blood, then the PCs are going to be asked to head out and deal with the source of the problem.

I have no intention of recreating the first Diablo, but that's sort of the model I'm thinking of: the outside world is causing problems for the town and the solution to them lies elsewhere. Even the folks on DS9 had to hop on the Defiant a lot in the later seasons, even if the wormhole came into play less and less.

Even if the issue is just monster attacks, something elsewhere could be causing them to increase in frequency and severity. The PCs can stay at home and fight an ever rising tide (and maybe even outlast it) or venture forth and cut off the source. Either could be fun, so I might not need to decide which course I want the game to take.

I got the above game off the ground, and it's going alright. It's slow enough that I'm considering running another one in parallel.

I'd like to run a game that involves the two things I've rarely seen together in my many years with the game: dungeons, with dragons in them.

There'd be more to it, like finding out where the dungeons are, and some information about them and their denizens, getting to the locations through hostile terrain, and then coping with countermeasures in the lairs to drive out or destroy the dragons. It wouldn't always be necessary to kill everything inside, and it might not always be possible or even helpful. The dragons would be smart and paranoid and resourceful and probably wouldn't just wait to be killed while they're trapped in a room with no means of escape.

That said, I would want there to be fights with dragons. The dragons might not stick around if things are going badly (and maybe the PCs won't either), but my goal is to highlight dragons as fearsome, not as pushovers.

I posted this in the main Game Proposals thread, and I got some feedback, so to address that:

"Countermeasures" would consist of traps, enemies and other challenges that work to either make the lair inhospitable to the PCs, or bring about some goal of the dragon's or both - or that just live in symbiosis with the dragon and have their own agendas. I've spent some time going over the available monsters to find ones that would mesh well with dragons, particularly ones with immunity or resistance to element types, both to stick with a theme and to allow the dragon to use their breath weapon with impunity.

I don't really want a lot of intrigue or any "civilized" groups opposing the PCs, even inadvertently. There are enough dragons that I don't need to use metallic ones, but if I did they wouldn't have anyone's interests in mind except their own. That most (if not all) of the traditionally "good" creatures default to "unaligned" is one of my favorite things about 4th Edition.

I'd probably start at a low level, because that's a little simpler to handle.

 Any interest?

Yup!

(Seriously, can't think of anything more constructive than that right now.)

In reply to LonePaladin (msg # 36):

What he said!

My most recent PBP game having flamed out, I'm thinking about starting a new one.

I was thinking about the one I mention above, with a focus on dragons inside dungeons. I'd dig having a dragon encounter as the first encounter, just to make sure the game featured at least one.

But I'm up for anything that people think they'd be interested in sticking with.

I'm open to starting at levels other than low-Heroic.

I'm open to Eberron and Dark Sun. I could do Forgotten Realms, but people seem particular about how that is handled.

Let's hear what people are up for and let's see if we can put something together with some staying power.

Edit: I'd be up for running a module, if a good one can be recommended. I'm looking at the old Isle of Dread to see if something might be done with that in 4th Edition.
This message was last edited by the GM at 21:59, Wed 28 Feb 2018.

[frantic online research follows]

The only 4E reference to the Isle of Dread was in the Manual of the Planes, making it a site in the Feywild.

In 3E, the Isle featured prominently in the Savage Tide AP, in Dungeon issues 142-145; there was an earlier remake/sequel in issue 114 that also placed it formally in Greyhawk (as opposed to its original location in Mystara).

So, really, the Isle would be left almost entirely up to your own interpretation for a 4E conversion.

As for the rest:

• Dragon Hunters: I'm all for that. It doesn't even have to be in dungeons. Give us a full-on hunt, trekking across the frontier, interviewing witnesses/survivors, chasing down minions, fighting our way through to the dragon at the end. Knock-down-drag-out fight in its lair (or a running chase through the terrain of your choice), scoop up its horde, go spend it, repeat.
• Setting: I'm good for anything, though I admit that I'm not a big fan of DS. (That's not saying no.) I like the Realms, but not how they handled it in 4E. Not unless you actually want to extrapolate on the Spellplague and its repercussions.
• Level: I'm flexible.
• Module: Want me to start skimming the ones I have here, see if anything stands out?

I'll look into Savage Tide


True. I mainly like dungeons for the limited choices they provide. I think it's easier to get people to make a choice when there are fewer choices, such as left and right, rather than every point on the compass.


Yes, the spellplague seemed like one of the more interesting aspects of that setting.

What I like about Eberron and dislike about the Forgotten Realms is that it feels a lot more like PCs can be part of events that change the former, but not so much the latter. That is, the Realms seem much more like something people expect to stay as they are in the books (changes between editions notwithstanding). Eberron's canon and development seem less strict.

For anything pre-written that I might run, I'd be interested in finding a way to place it in Eberron.

<quote LonePaladin>Want me to start skimming the ones I have here, see if anything stands out?[/list]
Sure, thanks.

I realized today that part of why I want to run stuff created by my and whatever players I have is that I feel desperate to get away from the idea that 4th Edition is only good for combat, and that combat is just about killing the other side. My preconception about prewritten stuff is that it doesn't do enough to get away from the tiresome aspects of the edition and of the hobby as a whole. I'm just thinking now that the "tiresome stuff" is somehow comforting to people and might engage them more. But that could be a vain hope.

If you're looking over adventures, I'd be most interested in ones that:
Have encounters that involve combat combined with goals that can't necessarily be achieved by killing or capturing the other side, or by getting them to surrender. I have rarely seen this in pre-written stuff. There's one Dungeon Delve encounter that involves a portal to the Elemental Chaos. The PCs can ignore it and focus on the hydra that's in the same room, but the longer they wait, the more demons will come through. The goal is to close the portal, which can, in theory, be done without killing the hydra.

Have skill challenges that are based on the original rules (with the updates) but are combined with combat or other skill challenges (see the hydra encounter I mentioned). Most pre-written stuff featuring skill challenges presents one at a time, as the only thing happening in an encounter. There's usually no reason not to put the best character forward and just throw dice at the challenge, hoping maybe for some good description to make it worthwhile.

Avoid reinstating some of the things that 4th Edition thoughtfully tried to get rid of. Someone suggested an adventure to me and as I was flipping through I saw two stand-alone "gotcha" traps of the sort that both DMGs and a few WotC articles recommend not using.

I'll be honest, I don't know much about the spellplague and would be happy to explore your version of that as opposed to canon.

I'm eager to see what you come up with here :)

I'll keep it in mind.

If the point of the spellplague is about the differences between 3.5 and 4th Edition, then I'm not sure what would be worth doing. If it's a focus of the current world, I'd be more interesting.

Does anyone know if there are any novels that touch on it? I've read a couple of Forgotten Realms books that were, ostensibly, set in 4th Edition, but neither mentioned the spellplague.

In reply to engine (msg # 42):

I know RA Salvatore wrote at least one set of stories where the a strand of the Weave touched Catti-Brie. It's been a long time since I read it, but it gave some detail about the spell plague and it's consequences.  (That book's title was 'The Ghost King')

More recently I've read a few short stories by the same author that touched on how wizards dealt with the change to magic shortly after the spell plague, but they weren't really ABOUT that...they just were set during that time with wizards as main characters.
This message was last edited by the player at 16:47, Thu 01 Mar 2018.

This wiki page does a really good job of summarizing the Spellplague, its causes and effects.

http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Spellplague

The novel Plague of Spells, first in the Abolethic Sovereignty series, is set right after the initial decade of the Spellplague, when people are just starting to figure out how to use arcane magic again. (It basically shut down completely in that first decade, so everyone had to start from scratch.) It's an excellent book, and the whole trilogy shows just how damned scary aboleths can be.

The novel Sword of the Gods is a fun read, while you're at it. Demascus is an interesting, quirky character, who shows that you can play a 4E deva without being all stuffy and serious.

In reply to LonePaladin (msg # 44):

I think I read the opening of Sword of the Gods and the last novel in the Abolethic Sovereignty (got it for free at a con).

That link was... informative. I don't think I know enough about the Realms as they were to make sense of much of it. As I understood it from a metagame perspective, it basically accounts for magic being the way it is in 4th Edition, the presence of dragonborn (and maybe a few other races), and the new cosmology. Was there more to in from a game perspective? I'll have to follow a lot of links to really understand the rest of it.

Honestly, I'd never even played in the Realms before 5th edition and its push for stories told in the Realms. So, most of my knowledge comes tangentially from hearing people talk about Drizz't stories and getting free Audible stories set in the Realms.

Since the 5e push to tell stories in the Realms, I've learned A LOT about the Realms from Chris Perkins' streamed games.  Acquisitions Inc transferred to the Realms when they changed editions, and Dice, Camera, Action started there.

In reply to Godzfirefly (msg # 46):

I read the Icewind Dale trilogy, and a few others with Drizzt and his original gang. I didn't feel like that gave me much of an overview. I dabbled in some of the old PC games, but not enough to really get a sense of things. Oh, and I did play Neverwinter Nights and I enjoy Lords of Waterdeep. For what any of that is worth.

Honestly, I think I'd mostly be up for handling it as just a generic setting, but once a person says "Forgotten Realms" it carries a lot of stuff with it.

I wish there were a setting that wasn't described as a planet so much as just plane that was essentially boundless (except when one followed magical guides to its edge). Someplace that could contain a "world" like Eberron, or the Realms, and could involve or even mix them, but which was big enough that one could adventure there without ever feeling the effects from any of those areas.

I want the Realms without all the baggage, I guess.

I dunno about the 4e era of the Realms, but I know that the Realms are encouraged to be played exactly like that right now.  The Sword Coast and adjacent lands have specific baggage, but there's supposed to be a multiverse around it that connects a variety of worlds in the Realms via Sigil.

(Heck, in the most recent session of Acquisitions Inc, the PCs visited a version of WotC HQ where the employees are literally wizards of the literal Pacific coast...and referenced a variety of worlds being connected to the Realms...including Phyrexia.  I know that it may not technically be canon, even with a WotC employee/creator running the game, but neither are our games, so we can run them however we like.)

The point is, WotC is currently encouraging us to consider all D&D worlds (official and Homebrew) to be in the same multiverse...all connected by Sigil.  That includes alternative versions of Faerun, if you like. Or worlds that have Faerun-like organizations without the same cities & characters. Or worlds that just use the same rules and assumptions of Faerun (like Golarion did.) Or any combination you want.

Oh. Thinking about it, it's more like I want to be able to use, say, Waterdeep, or Thay, without having to know huge amounts of the history of that locale or the locales around it.

I think I get to feel like the Realms (and the idea of a multiverse like that) aren't "points of light" enough for me. I like the ability to play as if no one really knows for sure what's over the horizon, or even the next hill. There are stories of a town over there, but who knows if it's still there? Go see.

Some races existed in the setting before, like aasimar, but the geographic changes of the Spellplague -- notably the 'return' of portions of Abeir -- made them more prevalent. There were genasi, for instance, but they were incredibly rare before. Most of the ones present in 4E Realms came from the sections of Abeir that turned up, along with dragonborn and tieflings.

In the Realms, eladrin are basically just an elven subrace, as are the drow.

If asked to pick something for a Realms game, my first answer would probably be a spellscarred genasi swordmage -- y'know, all the stuff they introduced in the FR sourcebook. Just to showcase the Realms-specific content. My other choice would be a drow dark pact warlock, but that particular build (the Slow Poisoner) could be a bit of a hassle for a DM.

As for the setting's outlook, here's my take on each of the major 4E settings and how they relate to PCs.

• Eberron tries to make the PCs Big Damn Heroes, making them larger than life and encouraging them to meddle and stir up trouble. The big movers and shakers (like Kaius III or King Boranel) are strictly in the background, and it's rare for them to actively get involved in the plot.
• The Realms polarizes the story. The novels are all about larger-than-life heroes and direct involvement of deities and world-shaking events, but at the table there's a big emphasis on the ordinary people who get caught up in it. While the Big Heroes (like Elminster and Drizzt) are taking on the massive problems, they're too busy to deal with the small-scale fallout. So the real heroes are the regular people who take up sword and spell to clean up after the big celebrities.
• Dark Sun, on the other hand, has no heroes. The world is bleak, anyone in a position of power is corrupt, and the best anyone can hope for is surviving for a bit longer. Heroism and altruism have to be balanced with pragmatism and a bit of necessary ruthlessness, or the so-called heroes get steamrolled by the greedy and ambitious.

Oh, and speaking cosmologically, Eberron is pointedly NOT connected to other worlds.

That's probably a big part of why Eberron is also not a well-supported 5th edition setting.  ;-)

By the way, that's a very concise and probably accurate view of those 4E settings.  I do have one addition, though...Realms has an interesting history of being about multiple interconnected stories.  That has obviously been turned up to 11 in recent years, but Realms has had a long history of multi-media adaptations that let the developers of the setting include references to characters and events that are somewhere else at roughly the same time.

It's probably the part of the setting I like the best, to be honest...and it's what makes the published adventure books for 5e the first ones that ever tempted me...because they tell a different part of stories that I have seen told from the angles of DDO and publicly played campaigns.  (I know the novels have always had that for Krynn, Greyhawk, etc...but that's less interactive and less simultaneous.)

As for engine's desire to use Waterdeep, Thay, and other setting-specific locations in a 'points of light' type campaign...I say go for it.  There have been PLENTY of near-disasters in the Forgotten Realms setting that could have easily gone a different way.  Just choose one and say it did go a different way.  Tell the players that they're starting in a city on the Sword Coast (or wherever) that survived the disaster, but no one in the city knows what/who/where else survived...or if they survived, whether they are the same as they were before.  The city probably isn't self-sufficient after the disaster (isolated cities rarely are,) so the city needs someone brave to go out and learn what's left out there before the storehouses are empty and their families start starving.  This way, you only need to learn the details of one city in the setting, you don't have to learn too much about it (since they won't be present in that location while they adventure,) and you can include as much or as little of the setting as you want just by saying that part survived.

(I'm going to claim that wanting to understand settings falls under "advice.")

What's with the two parallel worlds? Was one of them the "standard" Realms, or did people play in both worlds? Was the "sundering" part of a change to the game, like a new edition, or something in the books or what?


As I understand it dragonborn didn't strictly exist anywhere in the Realms until they were retconned with 4E. Right?

I always wondered about genasi. I'd never heard of them until 4E, so I assumed they were a major part of the Realms that I just hadn't heard about. Did they form a major part of one of the video games or the books. Tieflings, as I understand it, were brought to prominence with Planescape, so I tend to assume that new races generally stem from some iconic source.


Hm, I don't know anything about it. A drow dark pact warlock seems like an okay choice, but if a character is particularly gimmicky in combat I do tend to feel like it distracts from the challenge and themes of the game.


I knew that about Athas, but I'd never heard that about Eberron. Fine by me. I feel like I can bring elements across from other settings, but it's harder to remove elements.

Insofar as adventures in the worlds are about the fates of those worlds and the people in them, it's a bit odd for me to think of anything going on beyond them.

In Dark Sun, if anyone could leave, they would, and if anyone could come it with anything even moderately powerful they could have a pretty good run, for all the good it would do them - they'd still be in Athas. So, there's no point, storywise, in it being connected to other worlds.

Eberron is the name of the setting and of the planet, which is not really the case with any other setting. I'm not sure what Paragon or Epic play in Eberron should be like, since that's when characters start travelling the planes, or at least dealing with extraplanar threats. I guess it could be about Xoriat or Dal Quor finally making a move. But I feel like everything needs to move towards Eberron.

Only the Realms seem inherently like they can and should involve extraplanar adventures, mainly because it seems like a static hodgepodge. It was designed not to change or go anywhere without a driving force like organized play or an edition change. In the intro adventure in the 4e setting guide, the PCs are tracking some goblins who stole a ritual; at the end, they face down the goblins, but it turns out that their ritual was a fake and could never work. I felt like that sort of said it all: you can have adventures, but they won't really matter.

I quietly suspect is also has to do with the somewhat "non-traditional" nature of Eberron that people seemed to push back against. 5th Edition seemed to want to pull back from anything after the turn of the century.


That's another thing about the setting I find daunting, because I feel like it's expected. Even in the churned up 4e Realms, I imagine people who came to a Realms game I was running would want their knowledge to pay off, for me to put in references for them to get.

(Actually, what I'd dig doing would be to understand more about all these settings - in which all of the settings were in the pre-history of Athas and the PCs explore their ruins.)


That is actually almost the exact same premise that I just tried to run, though with a non-specific setting and city.