Roll for Damage

True Story. (Game summary)

I despise drawing out dungeons. Especially frikkin enormous ones like Scarlwall. 

See all those nice squares? Those are 10ft squares. So. I need a map that’s like 8ft long or so. And this is one 1 of like 4 levels in this castle.

Normally I make custom tiles from my computer (resize the bugger to what I need, print it off, tape it together… the image quality goes to hell, but its a laser printer so it’s actually pretty economical and saves me a million headaches as DM). 

Yesterday’s game was awesome, though. They got further into Scarwall, met the Night Hag that lives there, who led them to Belshallam’s lair. They hadn’t rested in a while, and some were at half HP. For some reason, they decided just to charge in, even after facing some minotaur guards and gargoyles.

Belshallam came charging from his lair, circled around, and used his negative energy beam.

Two players immediately dropped to -20 or more HP. Bye bye, Michel and Ricrill. Two others were in negative HP, but were able to stabilize. 

Butch the barbarian, who was not in the firing range of the negative energy was still at full HP. He fought the dragon face to face, alone with some help from the sorcerer who managed to survive. With the help of Stoneskin, and some lucky hits, they were able to drop the dragon.

Had the dragon been more sane, I would have had him flee as soon as he realized how hard the barbarian was hitting him, but Belshallam had been trapped in Scarwall for hundreds of years, and even though he would have begged for mercy 40hp to death, the heroes dealt a ton of damage in that last round of combat, effectively killing the dragon. 

The aftereffects of the fight will be felt deeply, though. Two of the heroes died. And not only did they die, their souls are unable to flee to the afterlife, as Scarwall binds their souls to the extremely haunted site. Until the remaining members of the party can break the curse, they will be doomed to experience the torturous existence of the tortured spirits trapped here through Kazavon’s dark legacy…

D&D Today! Hurrah!

I’m pretty psyched.

We’re starting the second to last adventure of Curse of the Crimson Throne, and our goal is to truck through it. I am scrambling a little bit because I didn’t prepare as much as I should have during the week, but I still have a few hours before the game that I will be dedicating to reading and getting minis cut out. 

They will be spending a loooot of time inside a haunted castle, so I’ve been previewing horror movie soundtracks.

I really like having ambient music going while we play. I just load it all up on my ipod, and it’s all sorted according to the “mood”… I have “Taverns”, “Dungeons”, “Combat”, “Epic” (For when something really important is happening), “Boss Combat”, and then more specific ones according to the area they are in.

For example: they’ve been jaunting about the Cinderlands, so I made a “Cinderlands” playlist that plays songs from things like WoW’s the Barrens, and Thunder Bluff.

I ruthlessly use 90% music from video games. Especially Elder Scrolls music. Skyrim has tons of combat music. I used to have the Neverwinter Nights soundtrack and that one was great too. I even was able to use sound effects from the game.

For this adventure, I think there will be a lot more movie soundtracks sneaking in… right now I have Dracula and The Village on the list and I’m hunting for more while doing my reading.