Reviewing the Scales of War: Den of the Destroyer (Overview)

Although the fellow who was reviewing the Scales of War adventure path (published in DDI) did just barely get started on the adventure Den of the Destroyer, I figured I should start at the beginning of the adventure while I get my head into this project. So, I'll try to summarize the mainstream plot and assess what I think that plot accomplishes well and what it doesn't:

The fifth of six heroic tier adventures in the path, it's written for characters who start about halfway between 7th and 8th level, and ends them at 9th level. The overall plot can be briefly summarized as follows: Upon returning from the Karak Lode, the PCs are summoned to return back to Brindol (where everything started) and sent with one of the artifacts they rescued in the opening adventure to a remote location where they must perform a ritual on it to awaken something within it. Along the way, they need to stop a gnoll shaman from turning himself into an exarch of Yeenoghu.

Highlights of what the plot should accomplish:

• Provide some closure to any conflicts with the Lost Ones street gang from the city of Overlook. (Accomplished pretty well)
• Get them highly ticked off at shadar-kai arms deal Sarshan by revealing both that he has placed a price on their heads and that he has been (at least so far) the ultimate mover of the various bad guys the PCs have encountered (rocky, see below)
• Introduce the character of Amyria, who has metaplot implications throughout the entire rest of the adventure path.

By making the Lost Ones the bad guys behind the opening skill challenge, and giving the PCs a chance to give them a pretty thorough trouncing, that's an ongoing enmity that can be laid to rest. By the time the PCs are finished with kicking the Lost Ones around, the latter should have it pretty well impressed upon them that they're overmatched, and leave the PCs alone for the remainder of the adventure.

The Sarshan elements are a bit rockier here, although I think a lot of that has to do with the overall rockiness of the heroic tier elements of the Scales of War in general. I find it really interesting that, when asked for best and worst published adventures for 4E, the six adventures that make up the heroic tier of the Scales of War have entries on both lists. Seige of Bordrin's Watch (second adventure) and The Temple Between (sixth adventure) are both consistently praised; the first and third adventures are pretty consistently un-praised. In my opinion, this one's someplace in the middle, maybe on the weaker side. Being able to really get the Sarshan elements revealed requires the PCs to knock out (rather than kill) one of the few non-gnoll enemies they encounter in the last 2/3 of the adventure. Moreover, it gets later revealed (in future adventures) that Sarshan was somebody else's pawn from the get-go.

The character of Amyria gets introduced fairly well, although not much is said about her real nature. Some (maybe all) of that is because when this adventure was published, the Player's Handbook 2 hadn't been published yet, and they were trying to not spoil the Deva race. The pieces they do/don't reveal here also leave it open to question how much of the plot points were being written by the various authors (granted, the author of this adventure is a Wizards of the Coast employee). In any event, this is one of the places where the path as a whole suffers from the decision to reveal plot points to the DMs as they arise, rather than to give enough of a summary at the beginning to support foreshadowing or ongoing plot threads.

Next time, we kick off with trying to assess the opening skill challenge, "Finding the Messenger."

Letting my Geek out.

OK... I've let this languish for far too long (3+ years and counting since my last post). Time to do something about it.

A couple of weeks ago, a woman who worked at tech site Gizmodo published what I can only politely call a screed regarding her experience with an on-line dating site. (I refuse to link to the article and give it more page views, for reasons that should become obvious in a moment.)  She opens by discussing some very creepy guys, and then gets a message from somebody who seems pretty nice. They go on two dates, and she then cuts him off cold after learning that he is a former world champion at collectible card game Magic: the Gathering.

Her post set off a firestorm in the geek community. (I'd like to use a stronger word, but my almost-6-year-old isn't allowed to read it.)  The most productive response that I've seen came from the gracious Monica Valentinelli, who is coordinating a week she's calling Speak Out With Your Geek Out.

So, I'm a geek, and I'm proud of it.

• I'm an almost life-long gamer -- look in particular at my RIP post for Gary Gygax just a few posts back. 
• I have recently started writing a column for a local parenting blog on playing games with kids. My target for these are specifically parents who have no idea what's up with the world of games outside TarMart.
• On the RPG front, I now have a mini-series (link goes to the final installment) of supplementary material for the most recent version of Dungeons & Dragons published by Kobold Quarterly, and expect two more pieces written for them to appear in the next month or two.
• My son is inheriting (being indoctrinated into?) my love of games. My daughter's too young to try to anything except eat the dice, so no idea whether she'll inherit the "game gene" or not.
• I love Good Eats. The word of Alton Brown is my culinary gospel, or pretty close.
• One other project that I'm going to try to publicly commit to here: Another gaming blogger was doing a pretty thorough analysis of a series of adventures published for D&D, and made it into the 5th of 18 adventures before he got bogged down. I'm going to try to pick up where he left off, working 1-2 times per week, and see if I can get us through to the end.

project report

Most of my first full week off from students was spent painting our bedroom and bathroom. We just moved all the furniture back into the bedroom; putting the fixtures back into the bathroom will have to wait until tomorrow, as I have to go buy a couple shorter bolts for the new light and because mounting the towel bars & such will require use of the drill. Needless to say, at 9:45, Leo's asleep.

Pictures coming sometime relatively soon, after everything's put back up, including all the art.

Summer!

It's the first full week of my summer break, which won't be much of one. Tomorrow I'm going to start painting our bedroom (one of two that we didn't do right after moving in), and expect that it'll be a 3-day project. After that's done, I get to start working on writing the lab manual for my AP class for next year. My goal is to have at least the first semester, and really the entire year, done when kids walk in for the first full day of class.

I'm back at Centennial next year, but am still dealing with some annoyances related to the out-of-state license, and if I can't get it sorted out, then I may not be able to go back for year 3. Unfortunately, it seems like I'm probably going to have to go through a lateral-entry program again.

The weather has been very, very, very wet around here, although we've survived it relatively unscathed. The biggest problem has been unrelated to the weather, which is that last weekend I was working on re-doing the guts of one of our toilets and cracked the tank.

Incidentally, between the move and a provider buyout, my e-mail address has changed a couple times in the last year. For those without a post-NC address, it's the same handle, but now at comcast (dot) net.

In memoriam (not family) / reminisces

I'm probably slower than many people in writing this, but let me add my voice to those mourning the death of E. Gary Gygax earlier this week, in Lake Geneva, WI. This post is, sort of, about the effect that he had on me -- even though we never met.

My introduction to role-playing games (old-style "Red Box" Dungeons & Dragons) came about in Oklahoma City, OK, on the last trip that we made to see my great-grandmother Pulley. Her next-door neighbor had a boy who was about my age, and he had an older brother. I'd been a fan of the cartoon, and the game looked neat. I didn't actually get to play much (at all? -- maybe 30 minutes) on that trip, but I was hooked.

It was probably a 2-year fight with my parents, who'd heard far too much about "the kid at MSU who lived in the steam tunnels because he thought it was real." Nevertheless, in 6th grade (the year after my parents split), the school librarian persuade my mother that there wasn't anything wrong with it. In the apartment building that my mother had, there was a high school student downstairs who was a gamer, and I became friends with one of his buddies. Many years later, I introduced Eric (the latter person above) to the woman who eventually became my wife.

My father didn't have as much problem with the hobby as my mother, and actually picked up German editions of a Gamma World and a Star Frontiers adventure when he went to Germany with his father a year or two later.

It was one of my high school teachers who broadened my RPG horizons beyond "hack-and-slash" style D&D, both to working on creating a consistent persona for a character and introducing me to other game systems. (At the time, it was principally Call of Cthluhu. However, he was the first person that I knew who had something published by White Wolf Game Studio, now the 2nd largest publisher in the RPG market.)

I continued to do RPG gaming through my undergraduate graduation. I've sold most of the things that I spent so much time and money acquiring when I was younger, although I've laid in a small stock of a few things against the day when Leo gets old enough to really participate. On and off, I've helped contribute to Project Aon as an editor or an XML markup typist. I actually really want to get a copy of The Prince's Kingdom sometime in the next couple years. It's a game that was written by somebody specifically for adults to play with their children. He's a little too young to understand now, but around his 4th birthday, it'll be a present to me.

Thank you to everybody who's been mentioned or alluded to here, even if I can't remember your name anymore. My imagination has become richer for your efforts, and it's a gift I hope I can share with my son. Someday.

busy, busy, busy

This school year is charging nonstop at me.

Tuesday night finishes up a class I picked up for the local Kaplan office at the last minute. The Centennial HS Production of Romeo & Ethel... I mean, Juliet goes up on Tuesday. If you've missed the news somewhere along the line, because I know a thing or 8 about how to handle a sword (thanks to Lansing Community College; search for PFSP107 & Durendal), I let the director know that I'd help with the fight scenes, forgetting there are as many in the play as there are. It's been chewing up massive quantities of my time lately, and only the volunteer services of a member of The Point (the local fencing club) are going to help make sure things pull together in time.

What with conferences last weekend, hosting Thanksgiving, and working an AP course for the first time since I was teaching at Durham Tech, I often feel like I don't have the time to be an effective husband or father.

out of the loud darkness

I've been dead quiet for a while because I haven't had time to think, let alone write.

The short update, with hopefully more to come in the next couple weeks:
- The house closing was a nightmare, because the buyers of our house had been trying for a loan through Countrywide, right as the mortgage market was busy blowing up.
- I'm now teaching chemistry & AP Chemistry at Centennial HS in Champaign.
- All of our free time has been devoted to painting the house or getting other, similar projects done. We've finally decided that we're going to hire somebody to finish the painting, especially because we have the paint bought for every room but one (where we're still deciding what to do).

One more quick story added in to the post Kirstin just wrote on Leo's blog.

More later.