Vondal's Vandals: Throne of Bone

[jarratt_gray]

We chased the last fragment of Karavakos soul through his infernal prison to a room overgrown with bones and seeping death from every corner. We knew it would be too much for the skeletal giants and flaming skulls that stood between him and us to be his prison wardens. Whatever they had been in life, the dark magics of Karavakos had turned them

Comments

[grandexperiment]

You guys have been in that Pyramid for a while :D

[jarratt_gray]

Yeah. We have. So over the Pyramid. Thunderspire was much better

[harkill]

Yeah that would be nice. It has been fun doing a lot of Roll Playing but would be good to do some Role Playing instead.. :-)

Which reminds me... I must look into subscribing to the online toolset... I love playing around designing stuff and they look actually really good for that

[grandexperiment]

P1 to P3 are a real mixed bag. P1 King of the Trollwarren Haunts, is better than H3 but it isnt a great adventure overall. P2 Demon Queens Enclave, however, is a great adventure and the best of the line if the GM wants to focus on interaction. P3 Assault on Nightwyrm Fortress is the worst of the line. Imagine the Pyramid as a series of 40 consecutive rooms

[jarratt_gray]

That sounds half decent. We could probably roll that and then either the Giants or the Demon Queen.

I really must write something myself. Maybe I should borrow the DMG and DMG2 off Lance. Need good tools for building encounters. Story is easy. Ultimately I would like to have something with skill challenges in every combat.

[grandexperiment]

Some other advantages:
- Courts of the Shadow Fey and Demon Queen's Enclave cover the three archetypal other worlds for Paragon tier.
- The HPE uber story appears in H1, P2 and then E1 to E3. So this route would still keep E1 to E3 open.

As for your comments, 4e shines the most when the DM creates their own story. The prewritten adventures are the weakest aspect of the RPG. On saying that, variety and appropriateness is the key. I don't think a Skill Challenge every combat would be good. But cycling through all the tools and choosing what works best is good.

4e's mechanics are a scale from nothing to skill checks to skill challenges to combats to combat with skill challenges. A good game should be swinging around that scale to whatever is appropriate. I even got to a point where I did incidental fights as Skill Challenges and plot central Skill Challenges as combats :)

[jarratt_gray]

Yeah, maybe you have a point

[harkill]

I think that rather than plonking a skill challenge into every encounter, you tailor each encounter to force the group to act more as a whole, or challenge as a whole. This is where self build really beats module play. The GM can target players strengths and weaknesses...

But really what is more important is cohesive storyline that lends meaning to the encounter, not the contents of encounter. IMHO

[jarratt_gray]

Agreed, but when building a module that someone else can run I think that story through encounter is a good way of creating that cohesive whole, and mechanically speaking encounter based story can come from skill challenges.

It would certainly need testing.

[grandexperiment]

Sort of. Personally I still see the mechanics like a camera lens than can be focussed as is appropriate. Putting skill challenges into every combat would basically make everything as important as everything else, and it would drown out.

Interesting encounters are important, no doubt, it's just that variety should be considered. Sometimes a simple encounter can be an interesting one.

In terms of combat, 4e has already kind of dealt with the idea of giving everyone the ability to contribute. PCs have equivalency both in terms of combat ad skill ability, though they differ in who it gets applied. As such, I don't think skill challenges would do what you what them to do. They would allow multiple avenues to success other than combat which may go some way to your goal though. The problem with 4e is that encounters all have the same victory condition and it's that that gets dull.