Hymn Collections For The Week Of 11/1

It’s time again to talk to the readers and collect the best 4e posts of the past week. Well, I’m coming up on a lot of work at the Uni, but also 3 days off in a row starting tuesday, all thanks to Veteran’s day! Hopefully I can do something for y’all in that time. I’m planning on having a Monsters of Eden: Antagonists section soon.

I’m wondering how people will react to the fact that I statted 3 gargantuan beasts for the heroic tier, so your heroes can truly feel mythological when they kill something that huge, that early in the level system. Is it pushing 4e too far? Well, I can’t say I haven’t done that before.

On to the posts!

Third Spirits of Eden Encounter Went, Uh…

My third encounter for my Spirits of Eden campaign had me really pumped. It was the climax of the adventure, with the players having reached the grove of Cybele, the mistress of the forest, and ready to confront her for the curative flowers that would help save the small child back in the village the PC’s set out from. There was some nice roleplaying at the outset, but quickly the fight degenerated into a string of misses.

Cybele’s defenses weren’t unreachable – the PCs just kept rolling so low they wouldn’t have been able even to hit level 1 minions. The alarming amount of bad luck in the climactic fight made me invoke dormant house rules to give them a fighting chance. This string of bad luck wasn’t really what I wanted out of the fight – I wanted the PCs to enjoy and clearly they weren’t and they were frustrated with this random dice wraith haunting them.

Evil Campaigning In The Spirits of Eden

I’ve never found alignment to be a useful construct in any way, shape or form. Whenever I DMed a game I would always discard it entirely and just ask players to give me some short, three or five word character motivations. “Gold,” “The spouse and kids,” “glory,” “pride,” etc, and then ask that they expand upon them a bit later. What was your character’s attitude about these motivations? And I would not punish with an alignment black-mark for say, being greedy, or trying to use diplomacy on the Devil as opposed to smiting and cleaving it.

Porting Over Drama Points

Like I’ve said before, I like making up 4e house rules for fun. Shifting gears: one of the things I like best about Cthulhutech are the Drama Points. Drama Points are a slightly weird meta-game way of having the players be just that darned special, because only really important characters (players and certain NPCs) get Drama Points, and Players always get the most. Drama Points in Cthulhutech manipulate the dice pool. You can add to your pool or subtract a dice from an enemy pool for every drama point you spend. You could still fail, but it certainly gave you much better chances. Especially if you subtracted from enemies.

The Clouded Palace: Part 1

I know a lot of people have been asking me for something like this, so I thought I would try. This is an outline for an adventure that sort of illustrates what sorts of things I think about when coming up with ideas for games in this setting, and maybe what sorts of things you could be thinking about when you do so as well. It is divided into 3 parts, this is the first one. The adventure will take players from an agricultural land, to a forest, and then to a palace in the sky.

This outline assumes mid Heroic Tier, around level 5 or 6ish. Refer to the Monster Manual and to the Monsters of Eden: Those Earthbound article when reading. If there’s any trouble or concerns, I will edit around to fix them – or if anyone wants some more information. That’s the good thing about blog posts, you can edit them. However I won’t be adding statblocks – that really takes too much space here.

–Wyatt

The Andalian Census: 10/2009

I decided to do a new column (with its own category) where I round up a month’s worth of the best posts from Spirits of Eden that you should check out, and some of my own thoughts of the month. These are posts that either I really like or that I would like to bring more attention to because they were relatively ignored. Not necessarily popular posts – I mean, if they’re popular, I don’t need to mention them again, do I?

Hymn Collections For The Week Of 10/31

I didn’t do anything special on the blog for Halloween, mostly because I really wanted to write that Dragons of Eden I post. The next Dragons of Eden will include some sample dragon NPCs/Monsters (about two whole Dragons, meaning humanoid and dragon forms of two creatures) as well as storytelling and combat tips for running dragons in Eden.

So now with that bit of news clear, on to the week’s interesting 4e posts.