Friday, September 17, 2010

D&D Essentials Game Day: Sunderpeak Temple

To celebrate the release of D&D Essentials and the new D&D Red Box, Wizards of the Coast (WotC) went old school and really brought some great memories back for an old time RPGer. Here is a break down of some of the interesting RETRO things they did to make this such an interesting event.

1. A Classic look on the cover of the adventure: The fighter taking on the Red Dragon! This is such an iconic image that players who played in the 80s will remember this image and think fondly of Keep on the Borderlands... which interestingly enough is the next Wednesday Night Encounters.
2. The Goldenrod character sheets reminded me of the old school blank character sheets that you could buy to make your PC look official. The images they used for the characters all looked very retro as well.
3. The "hand-drawn" map was classic! I loved the triangles that were not all the way closed at the bottom, it really gave it a feel of being drawn that day for the players. The one thing that would have really made it was if the maps on the inside cover had been printed in blue not black.

Now for how it played out! We ran several sections for this event. Some went better then others! We had one DM who almost TPKed in the first encounter! It was rough, but the players managed to survive... only to die 2 encounters later. They had fun and played it out to the bitter end. Another group made it to the final fight and found out that the Dragon was not as tough as the Orcs and Rage Drakes! The fighters both beat the Dragon on initiative and used their daily... then action pointed!

Just as a reminder, we run many sessions of D&D here at the Den. Come in on a Wednesday night to play D&D Encounters. This week will be the last session for the Dark Sun Encounter: Fury of the Wastewalker. Next week we start the new Encounter Keep on the Borderlands!

1 comment:

Striderlotr said...

I wish I could have given the adventure a try, but I was demoing the new Castle Ravenloft Boardgame. It is a fantastic boardgame! We ran the second adventure, as the first one is a solo adventure. I can't wait to play some more and not be the demo person helping to answer questions and keeping everyone playing.

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