Bunch of table news today, most of it bad and most of it not terribly relevant to you.  Adventure: The 3-Dragon Problem. Yesterday, the group I Dungeon Master for in Plymouth got together to play some D&D. Last session they suffered a bad defeat and all of their characters ended up captured. My solution to this dilemma was to put them in the shoes of their rivals and send them in to rescue their characters. I mixed things up, rather than letting them choose, and made the wizard play a fighter, the fighter play a wizard, the monk play a cleric, and the paladin was given a rogue. They successfully infiltrated, assaulted, and rescued their characters as well as a trio of townsfolk. I'm sure there will be no repercussions from the heroes being rescued by their rivals. But, as a bonus they got to know the rival party better than they might have otherwise done. It was a good session and I think everyone had fun. At the end, I told the gang to level up their characters, everyone is n...

Despite the Labor Day holiday weekend the Random Encounter gang got together to party up and continue the adventure.  Walton Glaives was absent from this session of Random Encounter because I was in Florida and couldn't get back in time to make the game. The group continued the exploration of the Warlocks Crypt. Monster's were killed, treasure was gained, and despite my absence Walton  became a 4th-level wizard. I have some decisions to make and a character sheet to update. Woot!

  2023/08/12 Session 5: Welcome to Weaverville (Campbell, Doug, Gryffon, Ronn, Zak ( on Zoom ) ) 1 Winterwane 5023 The members of The Order of Righteous Peregrination arrive in Weaverville late in the day seeking a hot meal, a strong drink, and a room for the night at the inn. Before any of that can happen, the group is questioned on the road outside Weaverville by a trio of red-cloaked sentries. The Order had seen enough of these cloaks to recognize a Redbrand ruffian when they saw one. These three seemed to be, and in fact, claimed to be working under the authority of the mayor. The hobgoblin, Vranden Charoz , was forbidden entry to the town. Yet another show of goblin intolerance and racism in this region. The Order was set to contest this, but seeing no support forthcoming from Sildar Hallwinter , they conceded to the local ordinance. Brandon shrugged it off and set to find a campsite outside of town. Eyrowyn Cwycyshyn left the party to join him. In the end violence was neit...

DM Mike being unavailable to run the Random Encounter group through Dungeons & Dragons adventures this week, we shall instead travel to other realms and play by other rules. This Sunday will be Iron Crown Enterprises' Middle-Earth Role Playing, run by GM Bob. Most of the group skipped gameday, but we picked up two players from the hobby store regulars at Out of the Box and that gave us four players and a GM. I'd never played any of the I.C.E. games, so this was all new to me. The system is very skill based and being old school, the skills involve a bit of math to figure out the values. Fortunately, there was a hefty stack of premade characters to choose from. I left mine with the GM, so I don't remember much about the character specifics. I choose a mounted warrior, I believe he was a rider of Rohan. So, some armor and a sword, bonuses to fighting on horseback. He was a warrior, that's really all you need to know. We started out defending a small fort that was exper...

I’m going to reveal the secret formula that turns the real world into the Realms of Adventure. So here’s where it starts. Take the 2020 census population number of any given place and divide by ten. Bam! You know the size of that same place on Marsilon. Pretty easy conversion. For the most part that reflects pretty well the world I’m trying to portray. But you’ll note that both Weaverville and Eureka don’t reflect that formula. central region of the big map Weaverville would be a Hamlet of 331 people, which is not large enough to support the businesses that I want to put there. That number is probably good for the map of Phandalin as presented, but we’re not using that map. The map being used shows Weaverville back when it’s population was 1,000 people. I’m going to turn some of those buildings into ruins to reflect the rebuilding going on in the region. That will drop the size of the town, I think we’ll set it at, say, a population of 931 people. That’s large enough to support an inn ...