Dungeon Mastering

Tonight I'm starting a new Dungeons and Dragons campaign and I'm really excited about it. I haven't DMed in a while and it will be cool to get back into the captain's chair. For the first time I can recall, however, I'm going to be running a prepared adventure! It will be odd to be playing a world that I didn't create from the gods up, but I've spent some time reading and adapting the adventure that I've decided to run, so it feels at least partially like my own. Besides, I'm sure there is still a lot I can learn from people who make their livings creating adventure. I've decided that, while I really enjoy 4e D&D, there are aspects that my group and I are missing out on. We have never really used skill challenges or minions in the ways that I think we could. Skill challenges seem like they have the potential to get in the way of role-playing, but I don't expect to have that problem in my game; when your gaming group is recruited from a theater program, you get a lot of strong role-players.

Our campaign got off to a mini-start (we'll call it the pilot) a couple of weeks ago for three of my four players. We ran the zero-level adventure, Temple of the Weeping Goddess, published in Dungeon on the Wizards of the Coast website and I have to say, that was a lot of fun. The rules for pre-adventurers were really interesting and fun to play with and they did a good job, in my opinion, of helping the players figure out who their characters were even before they started looking at classes and feats and powers. In the past few weeks, a year has passed for these fledgling heroes and they have gone off to receive training in their various disciplines. When they come back together tonight, they will have some new stories to tell before they set out on their adventures.

So, in a few hours, Nakano the human cavalier, Anariel the Eladrin skald, Krisaga the gnomish sorceress and Friedrick the gnomish monk will set out on the Scales of War adventure path! Stay tuned and I'll see if I don't have more to say about it later.