Siege of Bordrin’s Watch 1 of 2

        I'm going to split Siege of Bordrin's watch (SBW) into two parts because the adventure has two distinct stages. In the first part we introduce the players to the town of Overlook which from reading ahead a few modules will be a major hub of the adventures for a while. The town is a dwarven outpost with multiple concentric squares of walls separating it into districts each with its own personality and flavor. The module spends a fair amount of time describing each and adding random facts about each of the places mentioned in the key. My favorite was a bed and breakfast in the nice part of town run by an elderly couple who were secretly worshipers or Asmodeus. I couldn't help myself from adding that little tidbit into the campaign as a side adventure. There are a bunch of other really well planned and detailed locations to sprinkle into the game and the city is well detailed with its politics and such. 

    The real meat of the adventure starts with the group going to a meeting with the local council. The meeting is attended by numerous adventurer types that have been called from all over to defend Bordrin's Watch from the oncoming orc invasion that was hinted at in issue 156 (Rescue at Rivenroar) The adventurers are tapped to travel to a monastery and warn the priests there that the orcs are coming and they should evacuate facility. Now this being a dungeons and dragons adventure of course the heroes arrive late and find that the orcs have overrun the temple and have infested the place with dead dwarves everywhere. This part of the module includes 6 encounters: the entrance area, temple, underground sleeping area, stairs to the forge, and forge. The encounters in this part are varied. The first is a large open courtyard with lots of room to maneuver and lots of things to run around blocking line of sight. The second has a good monster selection with a good controller and some fodder for it to move around. The sleeping area is another wide open space with lots of details to use in the fight. The third is a long descending staircase with archers and a drake that harasses the players. The forge has a NPC that comes to the aid of the players and lots of fire everywhere. 
     
     I felt that this part of the module really shone and each encounter was different than the rest. The challenges felt difficult without being overwhelming.


Final Call
Ease of use: 8/10
Very easy to run, a quick glance through the tactics and you are ready to go. The well detailed city of Overlook really adds to the value of this module, even after you finish you will want to keep at least that section in your GM binder for future use.

Difficulty: 6/10
The encounters are difficult without being overwhelming. A good use of minions makes some of the fights seem very difficult at first because of numbers but soon the players will whittle those away into the real meat of the group.
Originality of encounters: 6/10
The encounters are each different than the last, in particular the descent down the staircase is well designed.

Overall: 7/10
Overall a well designed set of encounters

Rescue At Rivenroar

The first of the adventures we played back in January and February was Rescue at Rivenroar. RR is a fairly straightforward dungeon crawl  and most of the encounters are fairly simple to run. It runs in at about 20 encounters and a skill challenge. My players didn't have much trouble being motivated to chase the hobgoblins down and avenge their attack on the town but more headstrong groups might need more motivation and exposition then the module provides. The encounters were all fairly same type with a few melee and sometimes a ranged with very few environmental effects or anything of that sort. Bieng a first level encounter there is only so much you can do as a module designer but I would have liked some more choices for the PCs and some cooler settings then 10 X 10 stone room.

This room here was one of the cooler ones presented but it kind of fell flat because obviously nobody is going to step on those runes (which deal 2d6 dmg) and the enemies present here weren't really that bad 2 needle-fang drake swarms and 1 gnome skulk. The room gave ample maneuvering room to get around the hazard. If I were planing this room there would have at least been one range type monster probably a controller that could shift the players onto the runes in certain circumstances it would have added a lot tot he dynamic of this fight. by the end of the module most of the players were safely second level and getting close to third. This module does lead into the next somewhat but you do need to do some exposition at the beginning of the next module.

Final Call
Ease of use: 8/10
The module was very easy to jump into and use, about an hour of reading and prep and you were ready to go

Difficulty: 3/10
Being this was a first level module I didn't expect the encounters to be super hard but some were so easy for the players it wasn't even a challenge.

Originality of encounters: 2/10
As I said a lot of the encounters were very same old stuff. I wasn't looking for amazing here it is low level stuff but some cool vignettes might have been nice to break up the monotony.

Overall: 5/10
Even with two low scores for difficulty and Originality Ill still give it a 5 of 10 because its a good start tot he series it does a lot of setting up for whats to come.

Scales of War

Lately I've been running the Scales of war campaign from dungeon issues 156-176. This campaign style series of adventures purportedly will take the characters from level 1 all the way to 30. So far we have gotten through he first two adventures and they have been a blast. I cant wait to see how good the next ones are. I decided to blog about the adventures and let everyone know what our group thought of them. For these adventures we play roughly once a month between games Ill occasionally share my 15 years of game mastering knowledge here as well. For the campaign we have the following characters all of which are 4th edition from the players handbook 1 and 2.

E.T. plays a Warden currently 6th level
B.W. plays a Sword-Mage Currently 5th level
A.G. plays a Warrior Currently 5th level
F.S. plays a Rogue currently 6th level
J.C. plays a Paladin currently 3rd level (job has kept him out of last 2 games)
C.M. played a sorcerer currently 4th level (only came one game unsure if he will come back)

Usually we have from 4 to 5 players and our games run about 10 hours long. so far each of these adventures has run about two games in length.