Real-Life Monsters: Dunkleosteus

Dominic Matte

D&D has a wide variety of monsters, inspired by various legends, fictions, and real creatures. Some of these monsters are pretty scary, but there's still a lot of untapped potential in real animals - especially some of the weird extinct ones. D&D has gone into the past for some creatures, but mostly only the well-known ones - dinosaurs and mammoths being the prime examples.

But there's plenty of equally terrifying material in history, and some of it is even scarier and/or weirder than dinosaurs.

Here's an example: dunkleosteus.

Dealing with the Curse of Power...

Just to let you know, this was one of the most amazing sessions we've had so far. Others have been exciting, and suspenseful, and revealed much, but as awesome and fun as the others have been, none compare to the events of this session. I will not over-hype it anymore, but suffice it to say, the events of this session will radically change the world of Cyfandir and the lives of the characters we play within it.

Dallas Kasaboski

Viridi and Corellon's Blessed Sword

One item on the demon-turned-dragon lord of Ruber's wishlist had been procured, the holy weapon of

Dallas Kasaboski

an ancient paladin. Now, our characters travel to Viridi, the land of nature and magic, to acquire the next weapon.

Enter the Demon (devil!): Creating Tong zi Gong

Throughout the campaigns I've been involved in, my two biggest in-party philosophies continue to be:

Alex Adams

     1)  Have a reason to be where you are, but also have a reason to keep                                                                                  moving.
    2)  Always create character chemistry. Rub your personality against other player characters and see what happens (gross).

     This removes two major roleplaying bugaboos that face a lot of new players (myself included).  Firstly, their characters grow stronger on paper but don't evolve and grow as people, becoming flat and sterile.  Tied to this, PCs often run out of motivation in the world of the story, or forget what they have learned through character interactions and don’t know, on a personal level, why they are doing what they are doing beyond mechanically chomping on story hooks.

A Paladin's Sword and then off to Viridi

Our quest had taken an odd turn when last you looked. Thinking they were going to end Tong's

Dallas Kasaboski

turmoil by destroying the devil Votharxis and his Edge of Sanity, the party was instead surprised to find out that Baelfire, the lord of Ruber, was in fact a red dragon! They were defeated in combat and assigned to collect holy relics to help Baelfire in his schemes. Accompanied by tiefling guards, including now Guard Captain Verius, the party had made their way to Chalybs to collect the first relic.

Heroic Tier as Character Development

Dominic Matte

D&D 4e is divided into three tiers. Heroic tier spans levels one to ten; paragon is levels eleven to twenty; and epic encompasses twenty-one to thirty. The tiers represent three distinct stages (or power levels) of an adventuring party's career. In heroic, the players are small-time heroes or mercenaries, exploring dungeons and dealing with localized threats. In paragon they become well-known and deal with threats on the scale of countries or the world, at a power level far above the majority of people in the world. And in epic the scale becomes that of gods and legends, the characters carving out a place for themselves in the myths of all creation.

But you can also approach the tiers from a characterization perspective. This is what I've been aiming for in my current game. Instead of thinking about heroic tier in terms of scale, I'm thinking about it in terms of character growth. Early on this meant giving the characters plenty to react to and interact with, but as things go on, it (hopefully) means resolving major personal story arcs before the end of the heroic tier.