Wednesday 20 July 2011

Cellar



What Happened


See Hogar’s Journal


DM Points


Monsters: 5 x Vampire Spawn (Level 5 Minions), 2 x Skeleton Netters (Level 5 Soldiers), 2x Corpse Rat Swarms (Level 4 Solider), 1 x Frieda, Vampire Lord (Level 4 Elite Solider). – XP 1350 Level 5

Map "Cellar" Created map, see picture below.

As this is the last encounter in my Mini Adventure I made it more difficult than the previous ones to make it was more climatic. I had decided quite early on that the player character (PC) I used to play, Frieda, would become a villain so that I could still controller her and that she wouldn’t fade away into obscurity. As I was using lots of undead, due to my miniature selection there were three undead routes to go down, Werewolf, Zombie or Vampire. As my character was a female Eladrin rouge zombie and werewolf seems a little uncharacteristic so vampire seemed the most sensible option. I figured that all PC are Elite monsters due to having actions points so I set Frieda up as a Skirmisher and then applied an Elite template. The most sensible template to apply was vampire lord, so Frieda the vampire was born.

I wanted Frieda to arrive into the combat a turn after all of the other monsters, as an unveiling. This though only gave her 3 attacks in the whole of the encounter, 2 of which that missed! So the lovely template with lots of powers I had created was nearly useless, I have planned to use her Blood Drain ability once she was bloodied by getting into an advantages position with her teleport and then using her action point in the same turn, but she didn’t get a single action after becoming bloodied due to the amount of encounter and daily powers thrown at her pretty much by the whole party. I only made her level 4 as that is the level the characters were and she was meant to be one of them, but I think having her at level 4 meant her defensives were to low for her to have a meaningful effect on the encounter. 

On the flip side though we found out the swarms are really annoying!

We had only encounter one swarm before, at the beginning of the keep in H1. As we were very inexperienced then most monsters seems difficult, it was rare for us to go an encounter without someone being knocked out. So we didn’t really see the difficulty the posed. But as the party now has 2 and a half defenders 1 and a half strikers and two half of a leader only the controller has any meaningful close burst or area attacks. Also the first lots of rats did not move under PC’s as this is a rule were leant later, this meant that every time the rats were subject to an area attack at least one PC was. This helped erode some of there hp away, but even with theses factors the party all still remained standing. This shows that the party are more than capable of dealing with encounter a level higher than them, so I think I will have to throw more of them their way in the future.


Tuesday 19 July 2011

Library

What Happened - follow link to Hogar's Blog.

Gary, who controls Hogar in the party has been writing a blog to run along side this one. Gary has wrote the blog as a diary from his charaacter's perspective, as this covers that happens in each encoutner I will link to this rather than re-writting stuff Gary already has. Also the cinematic fell Gary portraits a lot more apt.





DM Points


Monsters: 3x Chillborn Zombies (Level 6 Soldiers), 1x Flameskull Deathmaster (Level 5 Elite Controller), 4x Pack Zombies (Level 2 Minions, created by Deathmaster) - XP 1150 Level 4

Map "Library" Created map, see picture below.

One of the encounters in The Haunting of Kincep Mansion is based in the library. I thought this was a great setting for a fight, so before creating any of the encounters or any other map I created a library. As this was my first ever map and I didn’t really know how to make maps, or where to find the tools to do so. We had downloaded the H1 maps from the Cartographer’s guide so had a poke around there, but most of stuff available so finished maps, which are great but I wanted image of stuff I could just drop into Photoshop as items. I mostly used Google image search for this map, but to find object that have been taken from bird eye view is quite difficult. I must have spent about as much time trawling Google as actually working in Photoshop. After finishing this map I found this site XXXXXXXXXX which has loads of cools items and building you can just drop straight into maps.

As I decided all good libraries are on two levels and it made sense to stick a controller on the top level and have soldiers on the bottom. So the temple I worked to was Commander and Troops with a controller as the commander. Originally this was going to be the final encounter so was quite hard and had a Flameskull (Level 8) and four Chillborn Zombies (Level 6) making the encounter a level 6 encounter. But as I had decided the level 8 was a bit challenging for the party I change the Flameskull to level 5 but made him elite and removed one of the zombies. This was defiantly a good move. Three zombies with accumulative auras dishing out 15 damage a turn was very potent but 20 a turn would have been two much of the party to handle.

As always though the map when designed was a lot different to how it was played, the party never moved to the top floor. Also I added in bookcases that I though could be pushed over, but this idea was only raised but the party towards the end of combat, so maybe I should have hinted at it when the party entered the room.