Dungeons & Dragons: Living Forgotten Realms

This past Saturday was Living Forgotten Realms (LFR) play at my friendly local gaming store (FLGS).

Up until now, I've only been playing D&D Encounters, and while I have found those sessions to be a good welcome back introduction to the world of D&D, I've been looking for something with a bit more narrative meat to sink my RPG chops into. Thus, when I saw the post for LFR play up on the notice board at the FLGS, I promptly did a little research on the internet to see what LFR was all about.

Players across the country and world create Forgotten Realms characters per instructions on the D&D LFR webpage, and then bring their characters together to play LFR adventure modules at RPG convention events, FLGS open play sessions, or even home game play sessions, tracking and documenting their play and character advancement via D&D's RPGA/DCI system. The LFR adventure modules are designed for both new and veteran players to enjoy, and even within the module adjustments can be made for playing "low" or "high" - adjusting the difficulty down or up based on the experience and composition of the player group at hand to provide the most satisfying experience possible.

Now armed with a basic understanding of the goals and mechanics behind LFR, I decided to brave the LFGS on a Saturday morning and devote a few hours of play to adventure in the Forgotten Realms, one of my favorite sword-and-sorcery fantasy world settings of all time.

Dungeons & Dragons Encounters: Lost Crown of Neverwinter, Episode 2

When last we saw my heroic alter ego for this season of D&D Encounters, Quendalon the Eladrin Bladesinger, he and his companions were catching their breath after having survived an attack of spellplagued drakes and zombies in a Neverwinter market square. Just as they managed to regroup and get their bearings, what should appear flying down from the sky but a spellplagued white dragon, come to angrily avenge the death of the drakes!

Thus picks up this week's episode of the Lost Crown of Neverwinter. 

Dungeons & Dragons Encounters: Lost Crown of Neverwinter, Episode 1

So tonight was the premiere of D&D Encounters Season 6, "The Lost Crown of Neverwinter".

If you'll recall from my post of 8.7.11, the prologue adventure to this season that was run on D&D gameday, "The Gates of Neverdeath", didn't go too well for me. Would tonight be another wipe for my PC and party, or would I and they have a chance at redemption?

Well, it turns out that tonight's adventure was an entirely different story (figuratively speaking). People showed up early to prep their PCs, and there were enough players for two tables, necessitating the drafting of another DM.

Dungeons & Dragons Gameday: Gates of Neverdeath

I was really looking forward to playing the Gates of Neverdeath adventure on D&D's Neverwinter Gameday this past Saturday and returning to the Forgotten Realms after a long, long, long absence from the richly detailed and supremely engrossing campaign setting (hadn't played there since my AD&D days waaaaay back, basically).

But...instead of a fun and entertaining session, all I got after nearly 5 hours of frustrating play was a Wipe/TPK.  

Well that doesn't sound so bad, you might say. Or you might ask, what IS a Wipe/TPK anyway?

So, without further adieu (and courtesy of the folks over at Wikipedia): 

Wipe/TPK - A Total Party Kill (TPK) or Wipe is the colloquial term for the demise of the entire party of player characters in a single encounter during the course of a role-playing game adventure. While many games permit other player characters to resurrect deceased comrades in some fashion, a TPK often results in all of the players making new characters (or the end of the campaign if the group is less cohesive).

Dungeons & Dragons Gameday Tomorrow! Neverwinter!

A new season of D&D Encounters starts tomorrow with the Nevwerwinter Gameday set in the Forgotten Realms Neverwinter campaign setting. I'm really looking forward to starting a season from scratch since I came in at the penultimate episode of the previous season,  Dark Legacy of Evard.

I'm hoping to play at a more experienced table tomorrow rather than at the newbies table that I had been playing at this past season. I think that I've picked up the mechanics of D&D 4e enough to not slow things down at the "regulars" table, and I've been getting a little short on patience for some of the folks at the newbies table - we barely managed to slog through and finish the season finale last Wednesday due to the slowness of some of the newbies as they fumbled with systems and mechanics pertaining to their characters.

I went a little overboard and pregenerated a dozen or so characters for the new season tomorrow, but better to be prepared with options than get stuck with one of the prepackaged PCs that every season has available for the Johnny-come-lately types. I'm hoping to play a Drow Bard, Human Mage or Half-Elf Sorcerer this time, or maybe even a Shadar-kai Monk, though I also have a Revenant Blackguard, a Human Knight, and a Minotaur Warden ready to go if I feel more Martial than Arcane. I'm also looking forward to the promise of an Eladrin Bladesinger class, so I whipped up an Eladrin Swordmage to use as a rough template should the new class indeed become available at tomorrow's session. Decisions, decisions!

I'll be back here with a play-by-play report of the gameday kick-off for the new season after tomorrow. I'm excited to be playing in the Forgotten Realms world, even if it has drastically changed since I last visited it many years ago back when it was still AD&D.

REVIEW: Digital Culture, Play and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader

"Digital Culture, Play and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader" published by MIT Press and edited by Hilde G. Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg, is a collection of works by various authors regarding the World of Warcraft phenomenon and how it informs contemporary notions of culture, play and identity.

I stumbled onto this book at Half Price Books in the role playing game section, of all places. After reading it, I'm not entirely convinced that was the best place for it to be shelved. The majority of the contributors to the essays contained in the book are Norwegian and all of the contributors are based out of universities in Europe, where they serve as social science and cultural theory academics. They all play(ed) World of Warcraft on the European servers, all served as part of the same guild, and used their experiences while logged in as the basis for their research, even going to the extent of holding guild meetings in the game world to review and share findings.

Dungeons & Dragons Encounters - Dark Legacy of Evard, Episode 12

Dungeons and Dragons Encounters is a "season" based weekly 4th edition mass game campaign produced by Wizards of the Coast that's played in comic book and gaming shops across the nation on the same day every week from season's start to season's end.

This season's campaign is "Dark Legacy of Evard", and runs 13 episodes. I'm only recently back into D&D after a very long absence away from the game, having subscribed to the D&D Insider earlier this week. This week's penultimate 12th episode was my first chance to put my subscription in action and see if I got my money's worth from it.

So far, the verdict is a big YES.

REVIEW: Dungeons and Dragons Insider

So as a birthday gift to myself, I took the plunge and decided to subscribe to the Dungeons and Dragons Insider on the D&D website for a year at a rate of $5.95 a month.

I'm hoping that it will help facilitate my entry back into the world of tabletop role playing games after a long absence from the hobby, seeing as the last time I played tabletop pencil-and-paper D&D it was AD&D 2nd ed.(published in 1989).

Is the investment in the online subscription worth it? Well, the subscription gains one access to the Dungeons & Dragons Insider Toolbox which includes the following components:

• A browser based Character Builder, which saves me from having to buy or hand write character sheets for my Player Characters
• An online  D&D Compendium, which is basically an indexed collection of all the rules from all of the published 4e D&D books, including both Dragon and Dungeon magazine content
• An online Adventure Tools service, which assists in dungeon mastering adventures should I ever care to take up that little bit of insanity
• Online subscriptions to both Dragon and Dungeon magazines, which I haven't read in ages but am really looking forward to catching up on

Time will tell how useful it all is when I actually start attending the weekly D&D Encounters session at my local comic book/game shop, but if nothing else the two magazine subscriptions alone seem to make it worth my while for now. I'll post an update after attending a D&D Encounters session this week with a review of how useful the service actually is in facilitating my participation and return to the game.

RPG BLOG CARNIVAL - What Makes a Roleplaying Game Bad Ass?

What's this thing called the RPG blog carnival, you might ask?

Well, according to the fellows over at Nevermet Press:

"Blogger carnivals are a way for a group of bloggers to all simultaneously write about the same topic. They are a great way to build community and dialogue across many different blogs at once. This benefits fans/readers of those blogs because they have the opportunity to explore lots of different viewpoints in a short period of time. It also benefits the bloggers because they get new readers to stop by and (from a technical point of view) it helps with SEO. Everyone wins."

This month's carnival topic is What Makes a Roleplaying Game Bad Ass?

Without further ado, here are my thoughts.