Twilight of the Gods: Mena

The other day I described how our Dungeons & Dragons group did the impossible and ascended into true godhood. This week, I will be showing off the new pantheon of our campaign world one deity at a time.

Today, we delve into the character that was most central to the campaign's story, and arguably the most important dungeoneer overall: Mena.

Twilight of the Gods: Cicero

The other day I described how our Dungeons & Dragons group did the impossible and ascended into true godhood. This week, I will be showing off the new pantheon of our campaign world one deity at a time. 


Today, I give you the lord of nature, rebirth, and vengeance: Cicero. Through the use of our divinity cards, the player of Cicero took an Elf Avenger and made him the patron god of creation and life. The gods act in mysterious ways.

Twilight of the Gods: KV-1S

The other day I described how our Dungeons & Dragons group did the impossible and ascended into true godhood. This week, I will be showing off the new pantheon of our campaign world one deity at a time. 


Today, I give you the lord of perfection, madness, and knowledge: KV-1S. Through the use of our divinity cards, the player of KV-1S took a Warforged Fighter and made him the patron god of dragons, hatred, and storms. The gods act in mysterious ways.

Twilight of the Gods: Quidom

The other day I described how our Dungeons & Dragons group did the impossible and ascended into true godhood. This week, I will be showing off the new pantheon of our campaign world one deity at a time.

Today, I give you the lord of perfection, madness, and knowledge: Quidom. Through the use of our divinity cards, the player of Quidom took a Deva Wizard and made him the patron god of monks, rakshasa, and the insane. The gods act in mysterious ways ...

Twilight of the Gods: Erishti

The other day I described how our Dungeons & Dragons group did the impossible and ascended into true godhood. This week, I will be showing off the new pantheon of our campaign world one deity at a time. 

Today, I give you the lord of judgment, peace, self-loathing, and contradictions: Erishti. Through the use of our divinity cards, the player of Erishti took a Shardmind Invoker and made him into a bizarre reclusive god, an ungod, whose personality is truly haunting in its mania.

More Doors

Having finished running through my 4E conversion of Chris Perkins' adventure Lich-Queen's Beloved, I've learned a few lessons about dungeons and adventure design. One of these is the importance of the architectural environment and the very elements of the dungeon itself. In Lich Queen's Beloved, the environment of the dungeon takes on an interesting role and challenge in and of itself in the adventure, namely in the types of doors that are encountered. Doors, I feel, are an oft overlooked source of hazards, terrain effects, challenges, and provocative dungeon dressing. At the end of this post, I also briefly touch upon a way in which we can all design dungeons with better (ie. more fun) secret doors.

What I'm trying to say is that we simply need more doors.

LCTN: Side Passage

THIS IS SCENE #5 IN A PLAY-BY-POST D&D GAME

Many elements of it are unique and innovative, with several key twists that will catch the players by surprise. The adventure is deadly and devious, with victory going only to those clever enough to take it. Though it may not be a traditional Fourthcore deathtrap dungeon, I assure you, dear reader, that it holds many of the ideals of Fourthcore close to its heart.

I will keep these posts easily collapsible, so that readers may easily skip past them if they wish. Although, really, you'd be missing out.

Magic Item: Blessing of the Beast

H2: Thunderspire Labyrinth is one of the better written 4E adventures to come out of WotC's offices. That said, it has a number of flaws and many areas that had a lot of potential that weren't fully realized. I've done a few things here on DMG 42 to tweak that up, not to mention the excellent work by 11 ft. Pole and The Demon Prince of Undeath. Taken all together, it's pretty top-notch.

One of the background elements to the adventure that I enjoyed was the theme of Baphomet the Horned God and his presence on the extinct culture of Minotaurs from the labyrinth. To help reinforce this idea on the dungeoneers, I added a Divine Boon to a few shrines in the adventure. Dungeoneers paying their respects at several strange altars were rewarded with a lasting reminder of the story of the dungeon and how it came to be, who passed by here before them, and why this place was unique.

Lastly, the boon has a mechanic to discourage the 5-minute adventuring day. This boon in and of itself would probably never make a dungeoneer think twice about taking a needed rest, but the design philosophy extended to multiple items and coupled with magic rings and the like which gains benefits from milestones, starts a growing incentive to make the difficult decision to keep pushing forward into the dungeon despite a dwindling supply of healing surges and daily powers.

Twilight of the Gods

The dream ending of many Dungeons & Dragons campaigns is to see the protagonists fight and claw their way to the hallowed halls of godhood and true divinity. But what does it even mean to become god-like? How does one emulate that which is unknowable using the primitive tools of a game that aims to "kill monsters and take their stuff"? I'm proud to say that my group and I have found a fun, satisfying way to cross that threshold.

And you know how I perceived one of the most glorious events in the universe? With these ridiculous gelatinous orbs in my skull. With eyes designed to perceive only a tiny fraction of the EM spectrum, with ears designed only to hear vibrations in the air. I don’t want to be human. I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear X-rays, and I want to smell dark matter. Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can’t even express these things properly, because I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid, limiting spoken language, but I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws, and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me. I can know much more, I could experience so much more, but I’m trapped in this absurd body. --Cavill

The end of a campaign has come and gone with one of my regular groups, and so I'd like to share some of the lessons learned on how we all came together at the table to craft a satisfying conclusion to an Epic Campaign. One of the things I'm most proud of was how we dealt with the player characters ascending to rule the heavens.

Magic Item: The Mirror of Shadows

The last item I have for Keep on the Shadowfell was the Mirror of Shadows, uncovered at the archaeological dig site of Douven Stahl. As an item of shadow, it seemed to me that this little mirror could stand to have more powers over darkness, as well as a small drawback for delving into these dark arts. The item below also encourages the use of rituals by granting a bonus to rituals with certain key skills. Rituals are such an underused component and factor in typical 4E WotC adventures, I've striven to give them a little incentive whenever I can.

Dungeon Oracle Interview

The Overlord at Dungeon Oracle sat down with me to discuss, among other things, the PAX East DM's Challenge and the place for competition in Dungeons & Dragons. Worth a listen if you've got the time!

Magic Item: Goblin Hooch

Goblins are funny, and in my opinion the 4E ruleset has neither enough low-level consumable items nor enough devices that can be used as a comic relief. Goblins make the best jesters, so I created this cheap little potion to be found within their lairs.

Magic Item: Silver Statue of Bahamut

Another item in Keep on the Shadowfell that I felt needed a boost was the Silver Statues of Bahamut, found near Sir Keegan's tomb. Written as is, I don't think they actually did any special effects at all. Or if they did, they were unremarkable and not very memorable. I wanted these hidden treasures to be a bit of a Chekov's Gun, foreshadowing the finale encounter and filling a starring role in that end piece. The items provided below have a negligible effect on actual game balance, but were clutched tightly in hand when the heroes were tasked with closing the dark ritual or Karax underneath the Keep.

Magic Item: Aecris

I'm in the process of clearing out all the flotsam and jetsam that has been floating around my list of Draft posts, ideas and snippets that I wanted to publish on DMG 42 at some point. Here's one of them.

Back a year or two ago, I ran a group through Keep on the Shadowfell, modified with lots of tweaks suggested by 11 ft. Pole, The Alexandrian, Demon Prince of Undeath, and of course some interesting new terrain powers from myself.

This post details the magic item I handed out when the dungeoneers recovered the enchanted blade of the Keep's last guardian, Sir Keegan's longsword Aecris. I felt like the magic item needed a little bit of pep, a specialty for fighting undead, and a potential dangerous side as it filled the wielder with a potentially fatal fanaticism in fighting undead, eschewing other, more tactical options to fulfill their desire to destroy the walking dead in a sort of reverse marking mechanism.

LCTN: Underground

THIS IS SCENE #4 IN A PLAY-BY-POST D&D GAME

Many elements of it are unique and innovative, with several key twists that will catch the players by surprise. The adventure is deadly and devious, with victory going only to those clever enough to take it. Though it may not be a traditional Fourthcore deathtrap dungeon, I assure you, dear reader, that it holds many of the ideals of Fourthcore close to its heart.

I will keep these posts easily collapsible, so that readers may easily skip past them if they wish. Although, really, you'd be missing out.

Charting the Unknown

At the end of the ancient year two-thousand aught nine, I divined a Dungeons & Dragons campaign entitled "Dragonslayers". Readers here have seen bits and pieces of some of the best parts to come out of that game, such as this and that, but have never seen that of which I was most proud and was most successful in terms of bringing both fun and immersion of exploration into the game world: charting the open seas.

The premise of the campaign was in some ways similar to Chris Perkins' Iomandra Campaign, although I assure you we came up with similar ideas independently. In it, scattered disparate islands on a watery world were kept under the oppressive regime of the Arkhosian Empire. The dungeoneers were the chosen few who could rise up and defeat the Empire. To do so, however, they needed to (among other things) unite the far-flung island communities and become masters of the open seas. The focus of this post is how our group collectively created the mechanics to go about exploring a vast oceanic world.

Siege of Barovia – A Ravenloft Mini Game

In this game, players direct heroes into the village of Barovia in an attempt to free its citizens from the terrible grip of a plague of undeath. Along the way, they will build up town defenses, train militia, and rescue new heroes to swell their ranks. Things won’t be so easy, however, as ghoul raiders, a zombie horde, and the dreaded Count Strahd descends onto the town to wreak havoc and destroy all life.

This game is based upon the Dungeons & Dragons adventures I6: Ravenloft and Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, and takes all images from from www.wizards.com/dnd