It has been waaaay too long since I last posted on the site. A whole campaign has come and gone, I have worked a lot on utilities to streamline table play, and I have multiple new adventures midway through development.

The one thing I haven’t done is maintain the site, my bad. I mean to change that now and grow this site into what it deserves to be. I gave things a fresh coat of paint today, and am brushing up on all the web technologies I’ve been missing out on.

I have so many places I could start… but I’ll think I’ll begin with an introduction to the Fallcrest campaign that ran earlier this year as my introduction to D&D 4th edition:

I used the town of Fallcrest in the Nentir Vale as the campaign’s backdrop. Both of my primary players were D&D vets (though new to 4th Edition), and we all worked together with the source material offered by the core 4th edition books to craft the character’s abilities and backgrounds.

Both character’s backgrounds involved a recent personal tragedy relating to their clan/tribe which lead to them changing their devotional allegiances from their ancestral dwarven/elven gods to a darker god of balance and death known as The Raven Queen.

The Stonewheel clan of dwarves had recently discovered a dark strain of ore deep within their mountain caves. In the typical dwarven fashion they dug too deep, and indavertantly unleashed a rift of dark energy that surged through the caverns of their clanhold. The rush of energy swept up and out of the mountain killing and corrupting most of the dwarves as it went. Havor Stonewheel the cleric was one of the few uncorrupted survivors, and he left the mountains shortly after the cataclysm in search answers as to what had happened and why he suddenly felt so cut off from the spirit of Moradin.

Aumnibiru the elven ranger had grown up fighting goblins in a perpetual territory war for Harken forest. A huge surge in the goblin population over the last 10 years had all but obliterated the Oaksinger tribe, and the last remaining tribe members were forced to abandon their homes in a pilgrimmage for a new land to sustain them. Unfortunately their path lead them directly through the troll-infested Witchlight Fens. As dusk fell trolls rose out of the marsh and began slaughtering the unaware elves. Aumnibiru managed a narrow escape, but he was the only Oaksinger to make it out alive.

Two days after the massacre Aumnibiru stumbled into Fallcrest seeking refuge just as Havor arrived to the town in search of an estranged ancestor’s tomb.

The characters started at level 2, and over the course of the campaign made it up to level 8. Havor Stonewheel was a dwarven cleric specializing in healing and ranged magical attacks, (using a build commonly referred to as a laser cleric). Meanwhile, Aumnibiru was a dual-wielding elven ranger using bastard swords.

Four to six players are considered the ideal number according to the official books, and we only had 2 regulars. As a result, individual encounter design was a little more limited until I developed an understanding of the use of different monster roles. However, we were all learning the 4th edition system together, so starting with more straightforward and simple encounters probably worked to our favor.

I think that’s probably plenty for now, so I’m going to cut myself off. Hopefully if I actually keep up posting I’ll eventually get good at it, because I don’t think I’m there just yet. But in my next post on the Fallcrest campaign I’ll go into details about the first adventure, the arrival of an arrogant young lord to town, and his search for magical artifacts.