]]> Introduction

If you’ve been following my story, you know I ended up missing the PAX Prime DM Challenge this year. I spent a huge amount of time designing my encounters and building my maps. This article is the first in a 3 part series detailing the encounters and maps I built.

The theme for the DM Challenge was “Dungeon of Horrors.” The idea was to design 3-5 encounters for a party of 9th level adventurers “that spotlights fiendish traps and diabolical puzzles, in the grand tradition of Tomb of Horrors.” I went back and read through the three versions of the Tomb of Horrors that I still have: the original, the recent RPGA reward version and the 4th edition hardback. The RPGA version was the closest to what I wanted to achieve (though I find the interpretation too literal). But something has been bothering me about 4th edition traps. My goal was to come up with 3 solid encounters with strong hooks and special effects.

It’s a trap!

Most traps in 4th edition, quite frankly, are boring. Greg Bilsland summed it up succinctly in a recent post. Either the party never triggers the traps (this happened to me multiple times DMing Season 3 of Encounters) or they notice it and someone disables it quickly. Most fourth edition traps feel like nothing more than resource sinks. One player is forced to spend multiple actions in combat to disable a device. That character should be running around the map smiting his foes – not tied to a square on the map trying to stop type X damage from draining the party’s hit points. Don’t get me wrong. This can be fun in the right encounter. Overall, traps feel too similar from encounter to encounter.

You must always be telling a story!

Here is my trick to making all your encounters dynamic. You must always be telling a story. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and earlier versions were great at this. Those versions of the game were combat-light and exploration-heavy. Every time you walk into a room, the DM describes your surroundings. As a player, you are automatically drawn into the story because you have to create a mental image of this location. This is especially true during combat. There are no grid maps or miniatures. You have to imagine the scene. 4th edition has a handicap in achieving the same level of player immersion. My experience is that players have a tendency to see a battle map in terms of squares and mechanics. The bloody pile of dismembered limbs, heads and torsos cast aside by the demon lord Baoba is simply “difficult terrain.”

The way to combat this is to insert interesting multi-dimensional features into your encounters. A floor that bounces like a trampoline. Rickety stairs that break and dump all creatures to the ground. Pretty much anything that makes someone have to think in 3 dimensions is going to have the desired effect. It’s sort of like George Lakoff’s idea about framing. If you read the phrase “Don’t think of an owlbear,” you will have already thought of an owlbear. Inserting three dimensional features into your encounter automatically engages the player’s imagination. They have to create a mental model their character’s surroundings. For bonus points, add some new simple mechanic. For example, in the trampoline room I would use the following rules: All bouncing creatures have a fly speed of 4. All creatures must touch the trampoline once per round or on the next round, the creature falls prone and moves straight down to the trampoline expending their move action. It’s a good enough start and easy to explain. Invariably, your players will come up with new ideas during the encounter and you will have to adjudicate rules of the cuff for backflips, wall running and body slams.

The map

My first map in the series is a gravity trap/puzzle. I wanted to create a map with unusual physics and some dazzling special effects. The party enters an enormous cavern with some ruined structures. It looks as if the area was once a carved room with incredibly high ceilings but most of the walls have crumbled away to reveal the cavern. Peering over the edge, all you see is inky blackness. Eighty feet up there is a circular trap door in the ceiling. There is a twenty foot wide section of wall that is still intact connecting the floor to the ceiling. Oddly, there are two large gargoyle statues on pedestals positioned on the perpendicular section of floor. The wall has a localized gravity effect with a 2 square height which allows creatures to walk on the wall. The gargoyles are not only statues. They are also switches that can change the map. One gargoyle controls the lock on the ceiling trapdoor. Spinning the statue left several times will unlock the door. The other gargoyle controls gravity effects in this room. Each position (0, 90, 180, 270 degrees) triggers a different effect. The effects are: turns off the localized gravity on wall, turns on the localized gravity on wall, turns off all gravity except localized gravity wall, inverts normal gravity (i.e. Everyone standing on the floor falls 80 feet to the ceiling trap door.)

One gargoyle controls the lock on the ceiling trapdoor. Spinning the statue left several times will unlock the door. The other gargoyle controls gravity effects in this room. Each position (0, 90, 180, 270 degrees) triggers a different effect. The effects are: turns off the localized gravity on wall, turns on the localized gravity on wall, turns off all gravity except localized gravity wall (i.e. zero G), inverts normal gravity (i.e. everyone standing on the floor falls 80 feet to the ceiling trap door.) You may wonder which effect is triggered when. The answer is whatever creates the most drama. As long as the effects are consistent, bring them out in the order that will be threatening but not wipe out the party in a single swoop. I also kept a group of bat-like humanoids on hand to swoop in and attack at an inopportune time -hopefully while the party is on the gravity wall to show off the unique properties of this map.

Map construction

Building this map was inexpensive. I bought black foamcore posterboard ($6), 4 3.8″x5″ thin metal plates($3.60), a roll of adhesive magnets($8) and a metal brace ($1.70). For the magnetic portion of the map, I cut out a 4″x16″ piece of foamcore. I evenly spaced and glued 3 of the plates to my foamcore with Weld Bond glue. I printed out my map tiles on cardstock and glued them over the plates.

Once the glue was dry, I flipped over the board and glued the last metal plate to the back. This plate would hold the map on my brace. I need to set the plate off the board a bit so I glued about 10 nickels to the foamcore and glued my plate to that.

One of my kids went to a pirate-themed birthday party and got a pad of paper with skulls on the cover. I ripped off the cover and affixed it to my plate to give it some more character. Once the glue was dry, it was time to see if the board would be able to stand up.

and a front shot…

I’m pretty happy with the way the map turned out. If I was going to construct this again, I would probably use better magnets. The adhesive backed magnets are not very strong. Large minis have a hard time staying on the board. During playtesting, I had a few mini avalanches – one would fall off and bring down the rest under it. If you handle them carefully, they will stay on the board very well.

                          

]]> I was sitting in front of the computer in my least dirty bathrobe with a cup of coffee when the tweet flashed across the upper corner on my screen. @KoboldQuarterly: The new King of the Monsters has been crowned! All hail the horakh, and keep your eye on it! http://cot.ag/9IUVid. It’s finally official! My entry in Kobold Quarterly’s King of Monsters 2 contest won best in show.

My monster is going to appear in Kobold Quarterly #15 Fall issue. The most exciting part is that artwork of my creation has been commissioned and will appear with the article. I can’t wait to see my glorious flesh rending and skull humping baby in action.

                          

]]> I have to apologize to all the people I missed at the PAX Prime 2010 DM Challenge. Literally, one minute before I walked out the door I was attacked by a raging owlbear also known to some as my wife. I had my laptop and projector packed in my backpack. All my minis were picked out. I had printed out the stats for my cast of characters. The statblocks for all my monsters including my award-winning horakh monster with custom-built miniatures. My stacks of foamcore maps. Everything. It was all in the car. Then, I heard the screech just as I was pulling the car out of the driveway.

I ran back into the house and into a full frontal assault by my wife who shall henceforth only be referred to as the Owlbear. After being torn limb for limb and left bleeding on the floor, I was accused of being an absentee father and making my owlbear into a D&D widow.

To be fair, it might have had something to do with my oldest daughter getting stung by bees twice an hour earlier and her left hand swelling up to the size of a catcher’s mitt, the five year old crying for her missing blankey while the two year old was emptying out the contents of her sippy cup onto the new bedsheets. What does she have to even complain about? She’s a stay-at-home owlbear. I’m a work-from-home dad who can watch the baby while she runs errands. This is her job as she so often reminds me. Do your job. Let me go!

I guess I do spend quite a bit of time obsessing over D&D and role-playing games. Last year, she told me I needed a makeover so I went out and bought all new T-shirts. All my old punk rock t-shirt were full of holes and starting to pinch my ever-growing frame uncomfortably. So I got an all-new RPG inspired wardrobe.  D&D conventions t-shirt reprints, shirts splashed with d20s and my favorite, my “I (heart) Dungeons” t-shirt. I also spend an inordinate amount of time reading RPG blogs and working on different projects. But the alternative is to sit and watch T.V. with her all night. The owlbear follows two shows a night including 48 Hours, Big Brother and the Real Housewives of INSERT A CITY I DON’T WANT TO LIVE IN. In other words, brainmelting horseshit that I can’t handle for ten minutes. I certainly do abandon my family for five hours every week when I ride my bike to the city to run D&D Encounters. Maybe she has a point.

There was nothing to do, but stay. Even though I had made plans with her a month in advance. Even though she had witnessed me spending every night (after I bathed and put the kids to bed) gluing and cutting maps, printing documents and crafting minis. Even after I ended up missing my ferry the night before the DM Challenge, spent all night stranded in Seattle, got home at 7:00AM and caught an hour nap only to get up and feed the kids while she slept. Even though I told her this happens once a year and it was important to me. Deep breath.

The owlbear actually has a blog that a few of you posted comments on when she blogged about D&D. She calls me “Big Daddy.” I didn’t claim her at the time because we had a “no follow each other rule” on Twitter, but that went out the window. I don’t know. How do you handle your significant owlbears?

I refuse to let the time I spent on my DM Challenge entry be a waste of time. I’ll be posting pictures of my maps, traps and encounters this week starting tomorrow. I spent a great deal of time to bring some new ideas to the game table. I hope you all like it.

                          

]]> As many of you know, I was picked as a finalist in Kobold Quarterly’s King of Monsters 2 competition for my entry, the Horakh. The final phase of the competition relies on public voting. I’ve already gotten alot of support from my friends, family, fellow bloggers and my tweeps, but I still need more votes to cinch the title.

The number one complaint I have heard is voting is difficult. If you follow the steps in this short guide, you can vote for me in less than a minute.

1.) Follow the link below to the registration page:

http://www.koboldquarterly.com/kqforums/profile.php?mode=register

Skip down to the “Login Details” section. You only need to fill out a few pieces of information here.

Email address: Use any email address you have.

UserID: Make up a unique user name.

Password and Conform Password: Type a password here.

State/Province: Your state.

Date of Birth: Birthday in the format MM/DD/YYYY so Jan 1, 1970 would be 01/01/1970

Click Submit.

2.) Follow the next link once you have successfully submitted your registration.

http://www.koboldquarterly.com/kqforums/viewtopic.php?p=13701#13701

You should how see a voting screen. Click the circle to the left of ”Horakh by Jobe Bittman’ and submit your vote!

It’s that easy an takes less than a minute.

Thanks in advance for your vote.

                          

]]> In preparation for the DM Challenge at PAX Prime, I thought it would be a cool idea to incorporate the monster I designed for Kobold Quarterly’s King of Monsters 2 contest called the horakh.  I looked through my garbage bags full of minis – YES! I have a sickness – but I couldn’t find quite the right fit. I needed something memorable. This is the DM Challenge after all! The current champion is none other than Dave “The Game” Chalker. (Note: You can read the details of his win here.) But that was PAX East which is basically a watered down version of PAX to suit the taste of the simple folk who dwell on the East Coast. This is PAX Prime. The real PAX in Seattle, aka RPG mecca. The competition will be fierce. I need to bring my A-game or none at all.

There was no other choice. I had to create my own Horakh mini. I grabbed my biggest bag of minis, dumped it on the hardwoods and picked through it like a hobo behind Morton’s Steak House only instead of seeking out the choicest morsels of filet minon, I was seeking out the cheapest ass minis I could find. The first rule of kitbashing miniatures is Never use expensive minis. The horakh is a gnome-sized insect that can leap fifty feet, sucks your eyes out of their sockets and plant eggs in your skull. It has a translucent digestive sac on its back filled with the eyes of its victims. I needed something small, insect-like and cheap. I finally settled on the “runespiral demon.”

In case you haven’t run across the runespiral demon, let me fill you in. It is perhaps the worst D&D miniature ever conceived. It’s a bug with hands and it has a rune-carved shell with a fin. Don’t ask me what events preceded the creation of this beast, but I assume a shark demon was on the outs with the missus, got drunk and had anonymous sex with a turtle demon. Ninth months later, or whatever the gestation period of demon sharkturtles is, there’s a surprise. But (so sad) the baby dies. The demon nurse carves its name on the shell and throws it in the trash, but that’s not the end. A bug demon with hands is digging through the trash. He finds the shell and crawls inside. It’s a comfortable fit and he decided to make this his new home. He finds his other demon bug buddies and they all hang out at the hospital waiting to get their own shells. It takes a while, but I guess they have alot of time in the Abyss.

I suddenly had an idea how to make an approximation of my monster. I could sculpt eyeballs and suspend them in a blob of glue. I snatched three runespiral demons. With an Exacto knife, I cut off the dorsal fin and scooped out a little pit. The pits would hold my eyeball sacs. Then, I painted an black base coat on the minis and set them aside to dry.

Next, I sculpted some Might Putty into tiny eyeballs with viscera attached. If you plan on kitbashing your own miniatures, you must get Might Putty. It’s cheap and it lasts forever if you are only using it for miniature work. Once the eyeballs dried, I painted irises and slathered some red paint on the viscera ends.

The next part took a few days. Once my eyeballs dried, I squeezed a small bead of glue into the dorsal pit of my former runespiral demons. I used Weld Bond, but you could use any glue that dries clear. Then I placed a few eyeball sculptures onto the glue and put the minis on the shelf. The following day I checked them. The glue had mostly dried clear. I then put down another bead and laid a few more eyeballs on top. I waited a few hours and put on my top coat.  I wanted a clear thick coating on top to simulate the sac membrane. Weld Bond glue has low water content so it doesn’t run or drip much. I was able to use my mouth to blow the glue into the areas I wanted and I didn’t have to worry about it running down the side on my new minis. Weld Bond is also great for making cardstock gaming terrain. The low water content keeps the glue from making the paper warp and curl.

After the last coat of glue, I couldn’t be impatient anymore. I had to wait about 3 days for the outer coat of glue to completely dry. I wanted to make sure it was ready for the final steps. It turned out pretty well. The glue hardened and became as translucent as I hoped. I could see the eyeballs inside the sac but they needed a little tint. I swabbed some Formula P3 brown ink on the glue and dabbed off the excess with a paper towel. It worked perfectly and gave the effect I hoped it would. Once it was dry enough to handle, I drybrushed the horakh with bronze paint and filled in the eyes. Check out the pictures below. If you haven’t voted for your favorite monster for the King of Monsters 2 yet, public voting is open. I’d really appreciate your vote. Follow this link and register to vote for the Horakh.

                          

]]> It’s official. My monster, the horakh, was picked as a finalist in the King of Monsters 2 contest. In case you haven’t heard of the contest before, here’s the low down. Kobold Quarterly periodically runs a monster building competition open to all. Designers can submit their monster’s statblock in Pathfinder/3rd Edition or 4th Edition D&D formats complete with flavor text, but no longer than 800 words. A panel of RPG celebrity judges picks 10 finalists, then the public votes on the winner. Public voting opens next Monday, August 30th. You have to register on the koboldquarterly.com forums to vote. I hope I can count on your vote.

The statblock on KQ is limited to RTF format only. You can find a more 4th Edition-friendly statblock below. You can also download my .monster file here. You can import this XML file directly into Adventure Tools to tweak the monster for your group’s level. The statblocks are posted for information purposes only and are owned by Kobold Quarterly.

                          

]]> On the last day of Gencon, I was finally able to snap some pictures of the new Lords of Madness set. The display was well hidden. It was the bottom shelf of the glass counters in the Wizards booth… right on the floor. The exhibit hall was wall to wall geeks. The only way to see it would be to be right in front of counter and look at your feet. Luckily, I caught a tweet from bensrpgpile that helped me find it and even then I circled the booth twice. I apologize for the picture quality. I was squatting down on the ground trying to get pictures while oblivious gamers were stomping on me trying to buy Magic the Gathering cards. Some of the pictures are badly out of focus. I did get good shots of the monster cards though. Enjoy!

                          

]]> I attended Luke Crane’s “Self Publishing Crash Course” today. It’s was chock full of great information for anyone who has ever wanted to publish their own game. Luke Crane, author of Burning Wheel and the Mouseguard RPG as well as other successful titles, graciously shared the knowledge and experience he has gained over the years.

Topics covered include:

- The pitfalls of working with a printing company

- Tips for getting your art/layout/etc done cheap

- Setting a price for your game or book

The talk is humorous and very informative.

Self Publishing Crash Course

                          

]]> If you are heading to GenconIndy, Vectorform and the Microsoft Surface team have a big surprise for you. Settlers of Catan on Microsoft Surface is heading to GenconIndy this week. A new video of game play was posted today and it looks amazing. Surface is shaping into the holy grail of tabletop gaming.

The most interesting revelation in the video is the use of physical dice on the virtual game surface. I’ve closely followed the D&D on Surface project, but I find its reliance on virtual dice a weak point. I hope the D&D Surface project gets released at some point and benefits from the phyical dice technology.

[Note: I misspelled the company name of the developer earlier. The company name is Vectorform. Many apologies.

                          

]]> Writer, game designer and creator of the Eberron campaign setting, Keith Baker, is running a cool contest on his blog. The winner will win a spot at his game table at GenCon 2010 where he will be running a 4E Eberron game. The game has been scheduled for Sunday, August 8th at 11:00 AM.

Keith posts a new question each week around Monday. The best answer wins the seat. There are only 3 seats left so get cracking. Read more at his blog – Have Dice Will Travel.

I got an honorable mention for my visual entry in Week 1. Keith posited the question, How will the Owl win the Race of Eight Winds? I guess Keith didn’t see how sleeping with the toughest competitor would allow the owl to win. Actually, I’m not exactly sure what I was thinking when I crafted this scenario…