Dungeon 220: King of the Wolves

Beth Trott's gruesome rendition of Isarr Kronenstrom, scourge of Icewind Dale.

November's Dungeon is a special one for me. As well as featuring my latest adventure, "King of the Wolves", it also contains my first guest editorial! It's been quite a prolific year for me in the ezines, so Wizards kindly asked me to put together some thoughts for this month's editorial. I wrote a brief piece about the creative process, focusing on where I draw inspiration for adventure ideas ("King of the Wolves", for example, is a mash-up of Rambo: First Blood and the legend of Beowulf - or more specifically, the movie 13th Warrior).

Although the adventure presented my tightest deadline to date, it ended up being the easiest to write - everything just fell into place. I'm probably getting better at writing to schedule, but in this case I think I just got carried away by the idea. It's quite a simple plot, drawing inspiration near the end from Aeryn Rudel's "Dead by Dawn", one of my favourite 4E adventures. Overcomplication is an easy trap to stumble into when writing adventures, and can be tragic when you're up against the clock. I guess I'm learning to keep it focused.

"King of the Wolves" ties into the "Legacy of the Crystal Shard" D&D Encounters series. At the moment I'm torn between running this and "Murder at Baldur's Gate" for my next home campaign: while I love the intrigue of "Murder", it sadly carries some plot holes and lacks player agency in places. "Legacy" is more dramatic, I think, so that probably sways it for me. Interestingly both have the same format: three factions that the players clash against, dynamically whittled down to one over the course of three acts. It's a nice model, and marks quite a departure from previous seasons.

If you like "Legacy of the Crystal Shard", "King of the Wolves" lets you carry on your adventures in the Dale once the season is complete. If you do get to play it, I'd be delighted to hear how it panned out (for us, it was nearly a TPK)!

Dungeon 219: Blades of the Stygian Masque

The fiendish Contessa Volto, masterfully painted by Chris Seaman.

The Halloween issue of Dungeon features my latest adventure: a hellish dungeon crawl for 27th level characters entitled "Blades of the Stygian Masque". Originally conceived for Fourthcore fans, I decided to take a punt and pitch it to Wizards before writing. Given its lethality I was quite surprised they ran with it, and especially pleased that it sailed through without a great deal of mechanical change. In the twilight of the edition, it's great to see some experimentation occurring within the e-zines.  

For those who don't know, Fourthcore puts the deadly back into 4th Edition, featuring truly lethal traps, cunning puzzles, and combats poised to punish poor tactics. I wanted to create a Fourthcore adventure that focused on combat over puzzles: in a sense, a "Tomb of Horrors" with deadly monsters instead of traps. 4th Edition does combat so well, so I wanted this to be my tribute to that.

My core mechanic was the hundred howling daggers: a set of flying blades spread throughout the dungeon, with each devilish "boss" carrying ten to twenty daggers. The PCs claim the daggers by slaying the bosses, enabling them to turn them against the others. Mechanically, each bound dagger adds one point of damage to every successful attack (whether ranged or melee). If assigned to a single party member - a striker, say - he or she can end up dealing an additional 80 damage per turn by the final boss encounter. The risk comes from that character then dying or falling unconscious - as this causes their daggers to fly wild, automatically dealing damage to every creature nearby until they're rebound. This created some beautifully desperate moments during playtesting, as PCs and enemies alike scrambled to bind the daggers before they eviscerated everyone on the battlefield.

Ultimately I ended up removing some of the deadlier Fourthcore elements, but I kept the daggers at the adventure's heart. I also put a lot of work into designing the opposition: giving them traits that split the party and keep the battlefield in flux. In the end I came to look upon "Blades of the Stygian Masque" as being more akin to one of the "Lair Assault" Encounter seasons, rather than a pure Fourthcore adventure. Hopefully I found a happy balance - but I'll let you be the judge of that!

Dungeon 215: The Rolling Tomb

William O'Connor's depiction of  Sacrademus, a villain from my "Rolling Tomb" adventure.

Around this time last year my first adventure pitch was accepted for "Tears of the Crocodile God". The last twelve months have been amazing - I've written four adventures for Wizards of the Coast, and I'm currently wrapping up my fifth. My third adventure - "The Rolling Tomb" - has just now been published in Dungeon 215. It's a piece of writing I'm quite proud of, and I really hope you get the chance to read through and play it!

"The Rolling Tomb" was based on one of Chris Perkins' ideas: a moving pyramid that crushes everything in its path. I'll admit taking on an epic-tier adventure was a bit of a challenge - I hadn't much experience running high-level games under 4E, so I had gravitate back to my longer-running 3E campaigns for inspiration. If you read through the encounters, you may notice nods to my favourite sourcebooks: "Sandstorm" and "Dungeonscape" in particular. For encounter construction I owe a lot to Sly Flourish's "Running Epic Tier D&D Games", whose advice inspired a number of villainous twists. Mike Shea is a top-notch designer, and I'd recommend his guide to DMs tackling high-level adventures in any system. "Running Epic Tier D&D Games" is currently being given away for free, so there's no excuse not to check it out!

Speaking of freebies, I'd advise any 4E fans here to check out fellow blogger frothsof's awesome fanzine "4E Forever": a mammoth 154 pages of houserules, monsters, traps, adventures and other crunchy goodness, dressed up in a pleasing OSR style. Frothsof really liked my Scalemail mass combat system, and asked me if he could include it in the fanzine - for which I'm very honoured. He even did a guest interview with me over on his blog, which you can check out here.  Scalemail has been reflavoured to fit the fanzine's own in-house world, and is now the chosen mass combat system for further submissions. Thanks frothsof! 

Dungeon 211: Glitterdust

This morning my latest Dungeon offering went live: a strange little adventure called 'Glitterdust', which is designed for a party comprised entirely of pixies. I had a tremendous amount of fun writing this, and it's great to see Wizards of the Coast experimenting with such oddball concepts. Hopefully you'll get the chance to run it too - we played it as a one-shot for playtesting, and it made for an interesting change of pace from our normal campaign.

I'd originally intended the adventure to be dark and mysterious throughout, much like Pan's Labyrinth, but it actually ended up much closer to a Disney movie - featuring talking animals, a bumbling human adventurer, and a wicked hag. This spirit is certainly reflected in the maps they did for the adventure, which have a pleasing cartoon style.

Let me know if you like it!

Dungeon 209: Tears of the Crocodile God

A sacrifice to Bansouk's vicious Crocodile God finally meets her maker...

Just a quick post to let you know that my first adventure is soon to be published in Dungeon magazine. Back in March I pitched Tears of the Crocodile God through the DDI submissions channel. I heard back from them shortly after moving to Guildford, and spent much of June writing and play-testing. It's been a personal goal of mine to have an adventure published in Dungeon, so it's fair to say I'm over the moon! If you're a subscriber, I hope you'll enjoy it, and maybe find some use for it in your own games.

Best of all, this isn't the only adventure I've got coming - after submitting the final draft, the folks at Wizards have been in touch with more work, and I now have more projects in the pipeline. Though Beholder Pie will be baking at a lower temperature until I'm done, I'll try and post updates when I can. The good thing about adventure design is that it keeps you thinking about the game, so there's lots I'd like to share. Until then, I hope you'll join me in raising a tankard to the Crocodile God - may he forever wallow in the blood of fallen adventurers!