DM Greg will be at Wizards of the Coast’s official Dungeons and Dragons Virtual Weekend in May. Come join me and signup to play in some Season 10 Adventurers League games!
May 7th 2pm EDT- DDAL10-02 Gnashing Teeth
May 7th 7pm EDT- DDAL10-02 Gnashing Teeth
DM Greg will be running two all weekend Dungeons and Dragons events at Ethereal Gary Con XIII. Gary Con will be 100% virtual this year running March 25th-28th. All of my games will be hosted on Fantasy Grounds Unity. Players will only be required to have an event badge and a FREE Demo License of the software.
The first event is a 4 day classic AD&D2e adventure B2: The Keep on the Borderlands using the AD&D2 ruleset available on Fantasy Grounds
The second is a D&D 5e Adventurers League format of DDHCP-TYP-Against the Giants
I hope to see you all there!
-DM Greg
This week I will be reviewing the DnD module Storm Lord’s Wrath on Fantasy Grounds Classic. My weekly Saturday campaign started with the Lost Mines of Phandelver. After that the party wanted to make the town of Phandalin their base of operations. I was able to stretch the lore a little bit and insert a forgotten city in the Sword Mountains and ran The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan out of Tales From the Yawning Portal to level the party up to levels 6/7.
From there the adventurers passed through the town of Leilon on their way back to Phandalin. The town was previously abandoned but now that I had the Storm Lord’s Wrath module loaded we had a map of Leilon and an immediate hook for the characters. Thanks to Fantasy Grounds there is a lot of immersion as images and maps that are usually printed in a book tend to be for the DM’s eyes only.
After spending 4 or 5 weeks of dungeon crawling this module was a breath of fresh air. The adventure contained outdoor/wilderness quests that were typically finished at the end of each or our 4 hour sessions. It introduced two new enemy factions for my players; the Cult of Talos and the Cult of Myrkul. Interestingly it also created some friction for my players in the form of Lord Neverember of Neverwinter since he ordered the reconstruction of Leilon while the party was out adventuring. (They seemed to think they had the rights to the town and took issue with the Wayside Inn being built too close to their turf)
After the hook things got a little awkward for me as a DM. The module as written uses a quest board system found in the center of town and doesn’t award experience. Instead it uses a milestone system awarding a level of advancement for each quest completed. Of course that was tweaked to match my style but did require some prep work to introduce quests through existing NPC’s that the party was starting to build relationships with.
From beginning to end this was a well thought out storyline that is building up to more adventures in the series. It introduced the characters to new NPC’s that I enjoyed roleplaying and created contacts for me to use later to insert more adventures.
The conversion to Fantasy Grounds was top notch. The story was properly linked, images and maps looked great, and encounters and parcels logically placed. The module itself took about 4 sessions to complete. My guys do like to go on tangents so I think there were technically 5 sessions, but we could account about 1 day just roleplaying in the world we were creating together. If you are a DM and used either The Lost Mine of Phandalin or the intro adventure from Dungeons and Dragons Essential Kit this is a great module to incorporate into your ongoing campaign on the Sword Coast. At $4.99 you are going to be hard pressed to find a better deal with such great content.
Until next time,
DM Greg
Ever consider running the adventure The Sunless Citadel in an Adventurers League format? I had the opportunity to DM it on Fantasy Grounds as a three part session over the course of May 1st through the 3rd at Virtual Kobold Con.
First off, Virtual Kobold Con was the result of a regional convention having to cancel their whole event and go online due to COVID-19. They were recruiting GM’s to run games over any virtual tabletop (VTT) to include; Fantasy Grounds, Roll 20, Tabletop Simulator, and even Zoom.
I saw a recruitment post on the Fantasy Grounds Adventurers League Forum looking for DM’s for the event. I felt this was exciting as I would be able to run multiple AL games over the course of one weekend. Then the light bulb came on. Why not run one of the D&D campaigns as an AL legal DDHC over the the three days?
After weighing some of the pro’s and con’s I decided to go with The Sunless Citadel out of Tales From the Yawning Portal (TYP). My rational is as follows:
After skimming through the adventure I felt if my table had 7 Tier 1 players there would be no problem getting through all the content. As it turned out our Friday and Saturday session took 4 hours a piece. Sunday was wrapped up in about 2 hours, but there was a little content in the dungeon the party decided to skip. I think 6 party members would have used up the entire 12 hours I blocked out.
It was a great decision to run the the module over 3 sessions. It was an even better decision to host a game at Virtual Kobold Con as the players at my table were phenomenal. There was the risk of not keeping all 7 through all 3 days the party was able to stick together all three days. It would not have been as much fun for me without them!
I look forward to playing at this event again next year!
Cheers,
DM Greg
