These are not the monsters exactly as I ran them; rather, they are updated versions based on my own experience with running them. They in general run on the more damaging side (as my players noticed) but also ideally of lower health and defenses, to get as close to L4D's greater swinginess (to use an RPG term) while still feeling like 4E. House rules that already do this (e.g. decreasing monster hit points and increasing their damage) will amplify this effect.

Zombie Horde Level 3 Brute Huge Natural Humanoid (undead, swarm) XP 150
Initiative +1 Senses Perception +1; darkvision
Grabbing Mass aura 1; at the start its turn the zombie horde makes a melee basic attack against each enemy in the aura as a free action.
HP 55; Bloodied 27
AC 15; Fortitude 18, Reflex 15, Will 15
Immune disease, poison; Resist half damage from melee and ranged attacks, 10 necrotic; Vulnerable 5 close and area attacks, 5 radiant, 5 fire
Saving Throws +5 to effects imposed by ranged or melee attacks
Speed 6 squares, climb 4
M Slam (Standard; at-will)
Melee 1; +6 vs. AC; 2d6 + 3 damage.
m Grab (Standard; at-will)
Melee 1; +4 vs. Reflex; 1d10 + 3 damage, and the target is grabbed (until escape). Attempts to escape the zombie horde's grab take a -5 penalty.
m Engulf (against a grabbed target, standard; at-will)
Melee 1; +4 vs Fortitude; 2d6 + 3 damage, and the target is engulfed by the zombie horde (until escape). While engulfed the target is grabbed, restrained, takes ongoing 10 damage (ongoing 5 while the zombie horde is bloodied), and slides into an adjacent square occupied by the zombie horde. An attempt to escape being engulfed takes a -5 penalty (not cumulative with the zombie horde's Grab penalty). Any ranged or melee attack against the target instead targets the zombie horde. While engulfing a target, the zombie horde can take no action other than to sustain the engulfment, although its aura still functions.
Horde Stability
The zombie horde can reduce any push, pull, or slide effect against it by 1 square.
Thinning Out (when first bloodied)
The zombie horde's size changes to Large, and all its attacks take a -2 penalty to damage.
Stragglers (when reduced to 0 hit points)
Three zombie rotters appear in any unoccupied space formerly occupied by the zombie horde.
Alignment Unaligned Languages --
Str 16 (+4) Dex 11 (+1) Wis 11 (+1) Con 15 (+3) Int 3 (-3) Cha 3 (-3)

The zombie horde owes much of its design to a similar homebrew monster on the EN World forums by a user whose name I unfortunately do not recall. It begins as a fairly normal swarm creature (though unusual in that it is a swarm of Medium creatures) with an unusual and powerful Engulf ability that unfortunately I never got to try out in actual combat. The Engulf ability is meant to simulate getting surrounded by the horde in L4D and is quite dangerous, although as a brute the attack is unlikely to hit.

One of the additions to most of these monsters from the versions I ran is a vulnerability to fire. When the tank attacked my players their first thought was to set it on fire; I had not originally included any rules for it, but I decided on the fly to give the tank vulnerability to fire (although not actually catch on fire from such damage, to my players' disappointment), which I then transferred over to the rest of the zombies as I went over them afterwards. Purely from a 4E stand point, the radiant vulnerability is completely servicable and adding fire gives them an additional weakness, but fire is such an iconic part of L4D that I didn't want to give it up.

Zombie Hunter Level 3 Lurker Medium Natural Humanoid (undead) XP 150
Initiative +8 Senses Perception +8; darkvision
HP 37; Bloodied 18
AC 17; Fortitude 16, Reflex 18, Will 16
Immune disease, poison; Resist 10 necrotic; Vulnerable 5 radiant, 5 fire
Speed 8 squares, climb 6 (spider climb)
M Claw (Standard; at-will)
Melee 1; +8 vs. AC; 2d6 + 3 damage.
m Pounce (only usable as part of a charge; standard; at-will)
Melee 1; +6 vs. Reflex; 1d6 + 3 damage, ongoing 5 damage, and the target is grabbed and dazed (escape ends all) and knocked prone. Attempts to escape the zombie hunter's grab take a -5 penalty. The zombie hunter enters the target's space, is dazed, and any melee or ranged attack against the target instead targets the zombie hunter. If the zombie hunter leaves the target's space for any reason, the grab ends.
Leaper
As a move action or as part of a charge, the zombie hunter can jump up to its speed without making an Athletics check and gains a +4 bonus to defenses against opportunity attacks provoked by jumping.
Flaming Hunter
If the zombie hunter takes fire damage, its attacks on its next turn gain a +2 bonus to damage (including ongoing damage).
Alignment Unaligned Languages --
Skills Stealth +9, Acrobatics +9
Str 14 (+3) Dex 17 (+4) Wis 14 (+3) Con 13 (+2) Int 4 (-2) Cha 3 (-3)

Hunters were especially interesting to design due to their Pounce attack. I borrowed from the horde's already established Engulf ability for an attack that did a lot of damage if sustained (though, like the actual L4D hunter, the initial damage is less than a simple claw swipe) but also made the hunter more vulnerable. (In one encounter, I had a horde attack a hunter pounced on a character due to its aura; I figured it fit the mindlessness of the Horde.)

Flaming Hunter is one of my favorite features of any monster I've ever designed. Part of it is that I like the idea of mixing advantages and dangers--hit the hunter with fire to do more damage to it, but also make it do more damage. And part of it is simply for the fact that flaming hunters are probably my favorite part of L4D, to the point that I giddily scream "Flaming hunter!" and intentionally set myself on fire when playing as one. (I suppose a few people might not actually know: hunters in L4D do significantly more damage when on fire. They also don't take ongoing damage from fire while pouncing someone, which makes setting yourself on fire extremely effective in most situations.)

Zombie Smoker Level 3 Controller Medium Natural Humanoid (undead) XP 150
Initiative +4 Senses Perception +3; darkvision
HP 43; Bloodied 21
AC 17; Fortitude 16, Reflex 17, Will 16
Immune disease, poison; Resist 10 necrotic; Vulnerable 5 radiant, 5 fire
Speed 6 squares, climb 5
M Claw (Standard; at-will)
Melee 1; +8 vs AC; 1d6 + 3 damage.
r Tongue Grab (Standard; recharge 56)
Ranged 10; +7 vs Reflex; 2d6 + 3 damage, ongoing 5 (until escape, and the target is knocked prone, pulled 3, and grabbed (until escape). Attempts to escape the zombie smoker's grab take a -5 penalty. Sustain Standard: the target is pulled 3 squares. The first time the zombie smoker sustains this power, the target is dazed (until escape). The second time the zombie smoker sustains this power, the target becomes unconscious (until the target takes damage from an attack). If the zombie smoker fails to sustain this power, the target automatically escapes at the end of the zombie smoker's turn. The zombie smoker can only recharge this power when it does not have a target grabbed.
c Smoking Cloud (when the zombie smoker is reduced to 0 hit points) ♦ poison
Close burst 1; +7 vs Fortitude; 1d6 + 3 poison damage, and the target is weakened and takes a -2 penalty to attack rolls until the end of its next turn.
Alignment Unaligned Languages --
Skills Stealth +9
Str 14 (+3) Dex 17 (+4) Wis 14 (+3) Con 11 (+1) Int 5 (-2) Cha 3 (-3)

The smoker is my favorite of L4D's zombies, and it proved the most annoying of any of the zombies in the 4E version due to its ability to attack at range and quickly disappear. The smoker is labeled here as a Controller, but that's mostly for diversity: all of the specials are clearly Lurkers, with the boomer having an obvious Leader ability as well, but smokers clearly have a minor in controlling as well--their job, after all, is not so much damage as disruption of the survivors' formation.

While the smoker proved the most annoying of foes for my players, it never managed to sustain its grab long enough to reach the more powerful effects (it kept strangling the ranger, who had a very high Acrobatics modifier), so I'm not sure how those work out. Obviously it's very powerful for a level 3 monster, but I also ruled that players could use their own move action to make an escape check for the grabbed player (essentially L4D's melee-to-free), which I don't think is RAW an option but seems reasonable.

Zombie Boomer Level 2 Lurker (Leader) Medium Natural Humanoid (undead) XP 125
Initiative +5 Senses Perception +1; darkvision
Boomer Stench aura 1; enemies in the aura take a -2 penalty to attack rolls.
HP 26; Bloodied 13
AC 15; Fortitude 13, Reflex 13, Will 14
Immune disease, poison; Resist 10 necrotic; Vulnerable 5 radiant, 5 force
Speed 5 squares
M Claw (Standard; at-will)
Melee 1; +7 vs. AC; 1d6 + 3 damage.
c Vomit (Standard; recharge 6) ♦ Acid
Close blast 3; +5 vs Reflex; 1d10 + 3 acid damage, and the target is blinded (save ends). While a target is blinded, zombies gain a +4 bonus to damage rolls against the target.
c Boomer Burst (when the zombie boomer is reduced to 0 hit points) ♦ Acid
Close burst 2; the zombie boomer makes a Vomit attack against each non-zombie creature in range.
Alignment Unaligned Languages --
Str 13 (+2) Dex 11 (+1) Wis 11 (+1) Con 8 (+0) Int 3 (-3) Cha 3 (-3)

Boomers are a finicky beast. Due to the way hit points work they need to be of lower level (or have a general vulnerability, I suppose, or make them minions, which would be hilarious) than the other zombies to make them seem easier to kill. I also didn't get a chance to see how their signature vomit interacted with zombies in play; the boomer's only appearance in combat only hit one player and the only other zombie around, a horde, was blocked by the rest of the characters.

Zombie Tank Level 3 Elite Brute Large Natural Humanoid (undead) XP 300
Initiative +1 Senses Perception +2; darkvision
HP 116; Bloodied 58
Regeneration 5
AC 17; Fortitude 19, Reflex 15, Will 16
Immune disease, poison; Resist 10 necrotic; Vulnerable fire, radiant; if the zombie tank takes fire or radiant damage, its regeneration does not function on its next turn.
Saving Throws +2
Speed 7 squares, climb 4
Action Points 1
M Slam (Standard; at-will)
Melee 1; +6 vs AC; 2d6 + 3 damage, and the target is pushed 3 squares and knocked prone.
m Smash (against a prone target; sandard; at-will)
Melee 1; +6 vs AC; 3d8 + 3 damage.
a Rock Throw (Standard; recharge 3456)
Area burst 1 within 10 squares; 1d6 + 3 damage, and the target is pushed 1 square and knocked prone.
Swat (when an enemy moves adjacent to the zombie tank; immediate reaction; at-will)
The zombie tank makes a melee basic attack against the triggering enemy.
Alignment Unaligned Languages --
Skills Athletics +9
Str 17 (+4) Dex 11 (+1) Wis 13 (+2) Con 18 (+5) Int 3 (-3) Cha 3 (-3)

Ah, the tank. The players appropriately grew terrified when the tank arrived, although due to its lack of entourage it failed to live up to expectations. And while its Slam and Swat abilities proved accurately powerful, I never got a chance to use Smash, which would have a significant chance of knocking a level-appropriate character unconscious. Due to the interior setting I also never used Rock Throw, but only pansies use that anyway. Unfortunately I could figure out no way to included the tank's ability to kill everyone with one punted log, car, or forklift and stay balanced.

The Boys are Back in Town

My last campaign was a travelogue in structure; that is, the characters were on a journey (though their destination changed and at times they weren't exactly sure what it was) and thus rarely visited the same place twice. They had no "home base", in campaign structure terms: a town or other location which they visited after completing major quests.

One of the many things different with my summer campaign is that I am trying to establish something of a home base, or at least let the characters stay in one location longer. But for that to matter you have to have an established setting with meaning and context, which means more than a map with a key and some brief description. I meant to reestablish (or really, establish, given the loose context in which the campaign began) the setting of the town of Winterhaven upon the characters' return, but, well, if you read these postmortems you know I mean to do a lot of things. (In retrospect, forcing the players to walk back to Winterhaven from the ruins of the Keep, and thus through the farms that surround it and through the gates and such, would have given plenty of opportunities for just this sort of thing. Oops.)

Instead, the characters found themselves in the ancient stone tower at the center of the town, which had gone unremarked their previous visit. They briefly met the tower's occupant, an ancient sage named Valen who offered some brief comedy (by pushing one of the characters off the tower's roof and then casting Feather Fall just before he hit the ground), then met with Freddy Lipton, their nominal employer (of sorts) on the expedition to the Keep, who simply directed them to convert their loot into gold at the nearby store--whereupon they were arrested by Winterhaven's guard captain, Andre de Ker, who had previously stirred trouble with the characters.

Only as Good as the Villain

Andre de Ker is, I think, one of the successes so far of the summer campaign. Villains are always interesting characters to me, in that I don't truly believe in "evil", just in the effects that fear and self-righteousness can have on people. De Ker is the kind of villain I appreciate and I think players appreciate a lot as well: not a villain with grand schemes whose opponent is the world, something that players have a hard time getting involved in, but a villain personally to the characters, whose evil is as direct antagonism against the players.

As the players realized as they worked out de Ker's past as a failed adventurer (from comments by Valen and de Ker's strange obsession with the Keep), de Ker is not so much evil as pathetic and jealous of actual successful adventurers. Making the conflict personal made the players hate him, not just the characters (leading to some hilarious moments in session 5).

You are Number Six

Not so successful was the concurrent introduction of our new fifth player. Introducing new characters is an art I have little experience with (and never on the DMing end), and the circumstances were did not help the situation: I helped the player create her character in the hours before the session, and our only discussion of how she might fit into the ongoing campaign was during the brief car ride over to our playing location.

I do think that the character creation process itself was slightly better. Since I knew for some time we'd be adding a new player, I gave some thought as to how to introduce the concept of character creation in a less haphazard way than with the first four players of this campaign. I realized that power sources, often ignored by more experienced players, are actually a very good way of presenting choices to new players: since I imagine most people unfamiliar with RPG mechanics come into the game wanting to play a magic user, a weapon wielder, a divine caster, etc., the power sources are, it seems to me, a better place to start than with classes or races, of which there are of course many. And if they do have a grasp of basic RPG mechanics--enough to grasp the class rolls, at least--then you can easily narrow down the myriad choices. In this case the player liked the sound of the Primal classes and, since she had wanted a companion similar to our ranger's beast companion, a shaman became a natural choice.

The actual character's introduction was unfortunately more-or-less nonexistant. The characters met her as a fellow prisoner arrested by de Ker but I never actually prompted an appropriate introductory dialogue. Once the players were freed (due to a zombie attack and most of de Ker's guards being slain in the initial onslaught), they simply brought the shaman along with them, since she was now a member of the party, of course.

ZOMG

There was a period of time while designing the Keep that I had no idea what would come next. I pondered various possibilities and eventually returned to one of the basics: an undead attack. It flowed naturally from the established background of the Keep (though the players have yet to figure out the exact connection) and gave an opportunity to run a series of encounters I have personally wanted to do for some time: Left 4 Dead, D&D style. I actually experienced a L4D-inspired encounter in a campaign I play in (and thus all the credit goes to that DM for the idea), but for my own I created custom versions of all the L4D zombies (minus the witch, although the imagery of the witch did come into play).

I didn't get to use them all as planned, unfortunately: the series of three combat encounters, always lengthy in 4E, in the back half of a session meant combat fatigue set in and the climatic battle--set in the Clue manor, standing in for the home of Winterhaven's Lord Warden, and featuring a tank, a smoker (which previously ambushed the characters while they were outside), a hunter, a boomer, and a horde, I ended up cutting the final encounter down to a brief confrontation with a horde and a boomer (which simply ran when the horde fell) and one-on-five fight with the tank, who despite his elite status (and due to my forgetting his regeneration) fell quickly.

The cliffhanger--approaching the final accessible room on the first floor to hear crying--proved quite effective, though.

Took a Level in Badass (Or At Least Not Dying)

The players returned the next session facing that the bad news that their characters would not be getting an extended rest, meaning the rogue remained at 1 HP with all healing surges used, and the good news that they reached Level 2. Leveling takes a while, but luckily many of the players, despite their relative newness to the game, had by now gotten enough of a handle on the Character Builder to do most of the leveling up on their own (an action I was initially quite wary of), with only a bit of overview on my part to ensure everything went well. Unfortunately the time won by this was offset by the extra time taken to set up a new player--time well spent, of course, but it nonetheless meant the session started much later than normal.

Leveling also reduced the rogue's problems, as to combat his constant shortage of surges he took the Durable feat (the bonus surges which I immediately granted him) and the cleric took Cure Light Wounds as his utility power, which he promptly cast on the rogue as well.

You Can't Go Over Water . . .

The players began actual play fitfully. They remained worried about a boss encounter ahead they felt ill-equipped to fight, and so it took some encouragement from me as DM to get them to venture forward to the next open room, which contained one of the most important parts of the Keep, a complex device that players figured out after some time (with the help of outbursts from the angry voice) was some sort of power generator and containment system for the planar rift that the deva's flashback had established the Keep was built to defend against.

The description of the centerpiece of the room--a group of metallic circles spinning in a spherical formation, with three large, finely carved gems set at the intersections of the circles--attracted the players, so much so that they were afraid of doing anything with it (correctly assuming that messing with whatever was containing the rift would have serious consequences). In the end I had to keep prodding the players, who eventually came up with a plan to instead cut the power lines connecting the generator to the rest of the facility (and specifically the magically locked door to the final room). But since in this case the generator's collapse was the inciting incident for the next act of the campaign, cutting the lines simply led to a feedback loop within the generator that brought the containment down just as well (and opened the door).

Something of an Anticlimax

The players entered the final room prepared for a boss battle and possibly the rescue of a prisoner (the fifth player waiting to be introduced this session). They found instead only a small but well-furnished room (everything was gnome sized, as they realized) and a ranting robot, now too confused and upset by the containment failure (I threw in a "resonance cascade" reference that no one got, unfortunately). The room also quickly began falling apart, along with the rest of the facility (the implication being that some sort of magical field or other device had been keeping the ancient ruins stabilized), but an escape quickly presented itself: one last false wall, revealed by its not shaking along with the rest of the room, behind which was hidden a teleportation circle.

Originally I imagined the finale of the Keep as a complex skill challenge involving an Indiana Jones-style escape as the ruins collapsed around the characters; I'm honestly not sure why I went with the hidden teleportation circle instead, aside from the ease of getting the players back to town. It certainly would have been a bit more exciting, though for once the skill challenge to activate the circle got everyone involved with useful skills, as the cleric and wizard used Arcana to decipher the circle itself, the ranger used Perception to search the room for useful information, and the rogue made one last attempt to get information out of the robot with Bluff--not to much use, but he did end up dragging the robot along as a man-sized trophy.

The Last of the Traps

When we returned from dinner, the characters had just recovered from a fight against themselves and discovered a way out of their illusionary prison. This short corridor led to what was originally planned to be one last illusion, more annoying than anything else--a hole in the floor of the corridor and the apparent doorway out on the other side, with the quick revelation that the "other side" was actually just a blank wall and the hole in fact led to the next level--that once again fell flat on its feet (and once again, to no detriment to the party, thankfully).

The last actual trap--the gnome's security system of pressure plates and magic crossbows (straight ouf the DMG, for once)--sparked some unintentional but welcomed humor as after detecting them each of the group managed to get across the pressure plates--except for the exceptionally agile rogue, who fell flat on his feet and activated the crossbows. Further humor ensued when the rogue asked as they fought the crossbows if the doorway was in fact still open--yes, I responded, hoping to give the party an opportunity to end the encounter quickly if they wanted to. They disabled the crossbows anyway.

The Voice in Your Head

The characters finally entered the meat of the Keep, beyond all the defenses. The first major detail I described was of a tinny voice shouting at them from somewhere distant but all-around them, a voice angry at their breach of the facility and ordering them to leave. The cleric attempted to negotiate with the voice once the players realized it could hear and respond to them, but quickly realized they would get nowhere.

I originally liked the idea of the characters being able to convince the voice that they were servants sent by the "master" it kept referring to, a bluff that the cleric in fact tried, but I was forced to discard this when I considered that a successful bluff would leave force a radical alteration for my plans for the dungeon. This was due to early plans focusing more on puzzles than combat--essentially, the players would have been helping the voice (a robot placed in charge of the facility in the gnome's absence, they would eventually find) restore the facility to functionality rather than just exploring its ruins and fighting the remnants of its production. I am still intrigued by this idea (and it would have led to far more sinister implications later on), but unfortunately I couldn't come up with ideas for puzzles that I liked enough and weren't simply following what the voice told them to do and so fell back on combat, a system which 4E of course handles much better.

Robot Factory (Minus the Machinist)

Players always grapple on to ideas you don't expect them to, hanging on even as you try to make clear that you have no plans for that eventuality--which is really your fault as a DM anyway; they should be allowed to cling onto the ideas they come up with based on what you've presented them. In this case there were two things the players grabbed on to: the ruins of the robot assembly line, which, accepting unfortunately that I was not about to deal with the players getting it running again for their own purposes, I simply had them able to start long enough for it to fall apart completely; and a "clockwork mechanism" they recovered amid rusted debris in a storage room, an item which I originally intended as simply a useless gadget to be sold (i.e., a clever way to give the players gold in a place where there would not reasonably be much gold to be found). The mechanism, a much more ambiguous item, has instead become a part of my ongoing plans.

The cleric also opted to spend the gold to use his Unseen Servant ritual and order it to search the storage room (and later the other rooms) instead of searching it themselves (although in the ten minute casting time I would have allowed them to find all available loot); I embraced this plan by having it find the mechanism immediately and wait for it to turn up the rest of the room's loot (4 healing potions) until after he returned to check up on it. Rituals are a part of 4E I feel are unfortunately under-used, and I continue to consider steps to make them easier and more useful. The PHBII classes' ritual casting features are a good start, and one that I plan on passing to my PHBI class players, allowing clerics to cast Gentle Repose once per day without components and wizards (supposedly the ultimate ritual casters after all) any ritual they know up to their level once per day without components (though this of course requires restrictions on creation levels to prevent enchanting item abuse--perhaps a limitation to only rituals with a set component cost?)

After a brief visit and raid of an armory, the players moved on to the next room, which did not come across as planned, to possible detriment. I described the room as full of mechanical equipment built around a low long metal table--intending but failing to evoke the imagery of Frankenstein's lab. This was, in fact, the "animation room", the place where the gnome's robots, after assembly in the construction room the characters already explored, were brought to "life". The players didn't figure that out (which was my fault, of course), and although this did not have negative consequences at the time, I fear it will come back to bite me in the ass later. (Of course, most of them read this, so now they know and will theorize accordingly, I suppose.)

Damned Respawns

The exit of the players from the animation room triggered the next combat encounter, the only actual one on the Keep's second level: a group of security robots (Warforged Soldiers and a Captain, leveled down) sent by the angry voice still yelling at the characters for their intrusion. The quirk to this encounter as the nearby open doors to a storage room where dozens more unactivated robots stood ready, with another activating on each turn, supposedly leading to a desperate in-combat skill challenge to close the doors before too many robots emerged.

But while the players quickly recognized the panels they needed to reach to close the doors, the Captain's tactical positioning of itself in front of the panel and his high defenses made the struggle instead simply to kill the Captain. The main culprit of this was the lack of forced movement powers among the party: although the wizard has Phantom Bolt as an at-will, the Captain's high defenses made it too difficult to use. As a result, I simply stopped adding robots after a number of rounds, though I continued to describe the threat of the activating robots, and the first few rounds proved to put enough fear in the players to make them very thankful when they did manage to kill the Captain and close the doors, at which point the session ended with the characters in bad shape--the party's rogue, downed during the fight with no remaining surges, managed to roll a 20 on a death save and thus was walking with 1 HP--and the players anxious and worried about what lie ahead, presuming a looming boss fight with the voice overhead and requesting an extended rest that I informed them (following the rule of needing twelve hours between extended rests, but also knowing that there was no further combat coming) would not be coming.

Same Bat Time

Session 2's end found the rookie adventurers taking an extended rest in a formerly ghost-filled hallway. Normally I try to end sessions on at least a minor cliffhanger, either some surprising revelation or the start of a combat--it gets the players excited for the next session and leaves them with at least some idea of what they'll be doing. I managed to do this in session 1, ending with a tease of the encounter with the mud lord, mostly by accident, but I couldn't get one for session 2.

This is more due to scheduling than anything else--unlike my previous campaign, which played a set day every week for a set time, and thus I planned every session to last that time and could plan the end appropriately, we play this summer campaign on a much more ad-hoc basis, essentially getting together when we can and playing until people need to leave. Without a good idea of how long any particular session is going to last, cliffhangers become much more difficult to pull off (although I did manage to half-way establish one at the end of session 4).

Trap, Crackle, Pop

Session 3 began after the player's first extended rest. I used the opportunity to try to recover a little bit of the sense that this hallway was not just a corridor where some ghosts once hung out by describing the characters experiencing disturbing dreams of ghosts--my personal explanation, though the players didn't get this and thus it was rather useless, was that after surviving the intial trap they were immune to further illusionary attacks, but their minds were more vulnerable in their dreams. I also started my work on connecting the players into the ongoing story, by having the party's deva (a reincarnating embodied angel) dream instead of what he quickly figured out was the Keep's past, implying that in some past reincarnation he had been at the Keep. The players also seized on the memory--of soldiers fleeing back down the hall towards where the players had entered--as foreshadowing of something particularly dangerous ahead of them.

First, however, they had to make it through the remaining traps. I had originally planned for the first level to have multiple paths through multiple traps, simply because I am trying to create more open-ended encounters and nonlinear paths (though honestly your players will always create their own paths as long as you give them the leeway to), but in the end the t-junction the characters found at the end of the hall became something of a false choice (at least as the players experienced it).

The players went right first and found a classic fantasy dungeon staple: an open room filled with fire crossed by a narrow beam. The fire was illusionary, of course, but once again I failed to have come up with a way of sufficiently hinting at this (and once again it didn't really matter). The skill challenge to cross the beam went quite well and produced an interesting and surprising narrative despite the failure of the trap's intention. The two acrobatic characters, a ranger and a rogue, crossed with little difficulty, leaving behind the less agile wizard and cleric. They found on the other side of the beam a passage of magical darkness that they could physically enter but could not find any way of seeing in. Cleverly, they came up a plan to stab a javelin recovered from the bullywugs into the mortar between the stone bricks of the walls and tie a rope to the end of the javelin, ensuring that they could make their way back. I had not considered this possibility (though it obvious in retrospect, of course), and so I quickly improvised a way to trap the players despite the rope.

Originally the dark room was supposed to lead quickly to the next and ultimate trap, the disassociation of the darkness necessary for the next trap to work well. With the rope, however, the players could reasonably find their way back to the fire room; thus I came up with an illusionary wall that only appeared to those who had passed far enough along the passage, trapping them there but allowing others, such as the eladrin wizard who realized he could fey step across and promptly came after the others, to follow the rope through to the other side--and become trapped as well.

The cleric, meanwhile, decided to explore the left option, which led to what I called in my notes the "crushing room", inspired, as my players quickly identified once the trap was sprung, by the trap from The Temple of Doom. I tried to introduce another hint to the illusions by describing to the cleric how the room was empty, but as he entered he tripped and found skeletons at his feet that had not previously been there (they had been hidden by the illusion until he made physical contact). Fortunately (or not), after activating the trap and realizing that the walls were closing in, the player rolled phenomenally and managed to shove open the door far enough to escape. (If the character hadn't escaped, he would have after taking some damage ended up in the next trap with the others--though I never quite came up with an explanation why, given that the previous trespassers had simply died in the room.)

Mirror's Edge

After a short interlude in the darkness whereupon I separated the players by describing how as they proceeded further their other senses dulled as well, eventually reaching the point where they could no longer tell if they were still touching each other, the players arrived at the final trap, a situation I had immediately thought of when I began contemplating an illusionary dungeon but feared would be easily spotted and extremely difficult to pull off well. Luckily, unlike everything else in the dungeon, this trap came off far better than anything I had considered possible.

I explained that the players awoke in two separate groups, both in small lit rooms and both surrounded by a number of monsters. I then asked the players if I could separate them--playing the two encounters out in two separate physical rooms as well--to enhance the feeling of separation. Trusting their DM, the players accepted with little second thought. I did explain as we went that this was something some DMs did, and explained my nervous and more frequent than normal pauses and considerations and combat note-taking as my having never split a party before in this manner--all of which was true, if missing the real point.

I alternated between groups each round; some of my players suggested it would be faster to just do multiple rounds with each group and then switch, but I brushed this off by saying I didn't want to make the others wait too long. Once again, I think the newness of the players and their trust in me as the DM and knowledge base of D&D traditions helped a lot; experienced players would recognize immediately that this was a very odd situation and probably would have caught on much more quickly.

As was, the players completed the encounter without recognizing the trap. The contigencies I had planned for, such as the players attempting to speak to the monsters (the monsters' responses would just be unintelligible angry growls), never came into play: the players simply attacked until they killed the monsters, or, in one group's case, was felled by the monsters. Then I described to the wizard's group how he finally got a grip on the strange magical aura that seemed to be permeating the entire level--and saw through the illusions that were the monsters, now revealed as their own party members.

It was a fascinating fight to run just for the strange dynamics of it as DM: I didn't do any normal tactical thinking for the fight as I made no decisions except for the one real monster in the room ( a fell taint drawn by the illusions), and so my energy was instead occupied with keeping track of who was attacking whom, who moved where, how much damage they did, and figuring out how to translate all that into the other group's map. It also gave me a chance to play with describing monsters I don't normally use--the stand-ins for the party consisted of a dark creeper (the rogue), a koa-tua whip (the wizard), a troglodyte crossbowman (the ranger), a foulspawn seer (the cleric), and a basilisk (the ranger's beast companion).

The players' reactions--both during the fight and after--were also immensely gratifying. During the fight they grew frustrated with me over the monsters' unusual healing abilities (especially when after "killing" the dark creeper it stood back up on its next turn) and high damage (all players used their daily attacks during the fight) and eagerly claimed the loot they were sure to get once the encounter was finished: "I want his staff!" After the fight, the players worked their way through the descriptions of their respective encounters, figuring out what monster action corresponded to their own, and generally reveling in how fooled they had been. They were so generally pleased and surprised by the encounter, in fact, that we decided to simply break and go to dinner rather than attempt to immediately continue the game.

Session 1 ended on a small cliffhanger as my new players approached the ruins of the Keep, the object of their quest, and a mob of bullywugs emerged and surrounded them, led by a giant half-dead staff-wielder (a Mud Lord with the Deathhunger template from Open Grave applied and a few custom changes). When the time came for session 2, the players were eager to blast some zombie frog.

Plan of Attack

Between sessions 1 and 2 I finally decided most of the details of the inner Keep: an underground dungeon with two levels. The second level, which I planned first before I was even certain there would be a first level, would be the laboratory of the ancient gnome artificer whose work would be the focus of this first quest. One of my players was surprised upon reviewing the Monster Manual that there were "robots in D&D": I was already strongly considering including warforged and that comment just cemented it. The lower level thus evolved fairly quickly as a facility for the production of warforged, albeit it with some more sinister details (which I will not discuss as the players have yet to discover them).

The first level proved much more difficult. My thoughts returned frequently to an illusion-based security system: the first level would in essence be a giant booby-trap designed to discourage and ultimately eliminate trespassers. Gnomes, of course, are known for illusions, and I liked the idea of players gradually recognizing that their experiences were not real (it appeals to my postmodern/self-referential sense, I suppose). Actually coming up with mechanics to produce that experience, though, proved quite difficult, and in the end mostly failed, with the exception of the final trap, which succeeded far beyond my wildest dreams.

Session 2

But first the players had to face the bullywugs. The initial description of the mud lord's escort, a pair of bullywug twitchers wielding javelins that seemed much better made than the previous twitchers' rough wooden spears and actually had metal tips, prompted the first great meme of the summer campaign: one of my players asked seriously if the bullywugs made the spears themselves or stole them, as "they don't appear to have metalsmithing capabilities". This comment prompted uncontrollable laughter from one of the other players, apparently amazed that anyone would consider such a question. To reward the first player for his thoughts, I told him what I had actually planned to inform them after the fight was over: the javelins bore Dwarven runes that suggested they were in fact stolen.

When we finally started combat, the players already demonstrated a firmer grasp of both combat mechanics and tactics. The players recognized the bullywug croakers for what they were: minions with a close blast attack that made them extremely dangerous while the party was grouped together and thus important initial targets. After those had been dispatched, the players focused primarily on the mud lord, reasoning that although it was obviously tougher than the other enemies, its death might cause the others to flee (a suspicion that was in fact in my combat notes). The combat took some time due to the mud lord using his template's abilities to heal himself: I tweaked the death hunger's abilities to allow it to intentionally sacrifice one of its own (in fact, a twitcher at full health) to use its Consume ability, describing it grisly grabbing the adjacent bullywug and biting off its head, which successfully incensed the players at both the brutality of the description and the mechanical effect of the healing.

After a brief interlude in the surface ruins of the Keep, the players proceeded to the first underground level, where I made my first major mistake of the session. I had continually returned to the idea that the gnome had not only set up illusionary traps but also attracted the bullywugs or other creatures in the past as savage guardians by posing as a Wizard of Oz-esque god. The first room, containing a crude, blood-soaked altar, was to have this illusionary figure appear when the players entered, but I forgot to put it in my notes, having never decided exactly how I wanted the effect to work, and thus did not implement it. This didn't impact the players much, luckily: the relationship between the bullywugs and the Keep's lower inhabitants was in no way an important part of the (meager) plot I had planned.

The first illusionary trap, an artificially lengthened hallway in which apparations appeared to attack trespassers, also failed to work as planned, due once again to my conceiving of an idea but not figuring out the details necessary to make it work. Thus it appeared to the players that they were simply being attacked by ghosts, a misunderstanding which, as before, did not really negatively impact the players. After the encounter with the ghosts, the party's third fight of the day, many of the players were almost entirely out of healing surges and thus they requested an extended rest as we ended the session. I considered it over the time inbetween and agreed, recognizing that the number of upcoming combats and/or possible damage would require a rest at some point.

I was quite surprised when an old high school friend texted me a few weeks into the summer asking for help with a tabletop game of Hunter: the Reckoning. What followed was a few hours hanging out with friends I had hardly talked to in two years (good--the hanging out part, not the two years part) and reading through the Hunter manual the following day (not so much bad as ugly). Since none of the others had ever so much as played a tabletop RPG and I had just finished DMing a game of D&D 4E, they trusted my judgment when I said the Hunter manual was a mess and D&D would actually be easier for everyone. (They figured Hunter was something like "D&D lite", and it certainly has less rules, but that also means less structure, which is generally a bad thing for new players.)

Session 0

Our first session was simply character creation; since I didn't even know what game we were playing until a few hours before, I had no real preparation at all and simply brought four blank character sheets and a laptop with the official Character Builder on it (an extremely useful tool, though not without its quirks). After character creation, though, the players asked me to start the game . . . so I put it back on the players: how do you meet? Beginners, of course, need a bit more guidance than that and had no real ideas (my own fault for not coming with some kind of hook/basic intro prepared, but understandable given the circumstances I hope), but luckily one of my players had a bit more knowledge and suggested we go with the cliche and start in a tavern. After each player spun a bit of backstory for their characters--two, to my surprise and delight, connecting themselves prior to the official start--we were off, slowly, awkwardly, painfully, through a brief bar fight and theft. Then we adjourned for the night and my players decided on our next playing time--the following evening.

Theme Theory

My first recognition was that this campaign would be very, very different from the one I had run previously. My last (and first) campaign was built on around a world and narrative arc I had been contemplating and slowly evolving for almost a year before the campaign itself started (far before I had any idea of who my players would be or what characters they might play); thus I had a good idea of where I was going from the beginning but left little room for nonlinear exploration or character development. My players were also all as experienced as myself with the game; perhaps not always as encyclopedically knowledgeable about the system, but they understood the rules and all of their own characters' abilities (and indeed all of them had DMed a game of their own at one point or another). The campaign had a strong rooting in my personal thematic concerns toward D&D: it was in many ways an intentional deconstruction of many traditional D&D trends, notably the entire basic conceit of the players as powerful characters who nobly decide the fate of the world. (As one of my players said after its conclusion: "We didn't actually accomplish anything . . .")

This summer campaign had to be different, obviously. While I had toyed with ideas for another campaign towards the end of my first, they were all founded on 4E's paragon tier and meant to continue my deconstructive tendencies--not a framework that would work well with all new players, who clearly were best started at first level in a more traditional D&D adventure (as I had myself started). And so I essentially began from scratch--but with only one day to plan before the first true session, I didn't make everything anew. Instead I looked to the official D&D adventures--the first time I ever really considered substantially borrowing from others' material. I took the village from the (now free) first 4E adventure module (Keep on the Shadowfell), Winterhaven, and began plotting a short first adventure involving an ancient ruined Keep--which also became the basis of my first genuine dungeon crawl (excluding a short cave run in my first campaign which had only one actual combat encounter).

While I couldn't use many of the themes or plots I had considered for a second campaign and I was borrowing liberally from official D&D adventures, I did set out to follow another aspect of my thoughts for a follow-up campaign: increased player agency. My primary dissatisfaction with my first campaign was its linearity and the lack of influence my players had on its outcome--while some of this was the point (they weren't the ones to save the world), I wanted them to be able to influence their personal stakes, which also necessitated their personal stakes be a much bigger part of the campaign. I haven't quite gotten to this yet in the summer campaign's actual play, but it is a major consideration of my plans for the future.

I also want to cater to my players' desires more, and this I have been able to do more quickly: during character creation one of my players looked through the Monster Manual and found the "frog monsters" (bullywugs) hilarious; I noted this and made the first true enemy the party faced on the way to the Keep a tribe of savage bullywugs. (The player on figuring out what was attacking him: "Are these those frog things?!") My players seemed particularly amused by the idea of monstrous gnomes as well, which led to my deciding that the ancient wizard whose laboratory they would find in the ruins of the Keep would be a gnome.

Session 1

Due to my limited time I didn't get the power cards (an almost necessary tool for 4E, in my experience) finished before the session; therefore I simply brought index cards, made a few examples, and gave them to my players to do themselves. This I think was actually helpful (despite my replacing them next session with better printed ones) because it forced my players to actually read each of their powers all the way through, and although they still didn't have a complete grasp on the rules and terminology and thus what each power actually did mechanically, they did get a better idea of their capabilities. (One of my players picked up on his chosen encounter power being an immediate reaction and asked if he could use it in our first combat when he was attacked; I hadn't even remembered he had it.)

Not so successful a mistake was my lack of planning for player eventualities; for some reason I have a tendency to come up with a plot or way for things to play out (itself not a very good habit as a DM) and then not develop the necessary justification for it to players. (I just tell myself that's a small thing I'll get to in time--and then rarely do.) This is the realm, of course, of hooks; how to get players to bite on the adventure you've prepared. Coming off an extremely linear campaign in which there was rarely alternative courses of action (in a way that mattered to the general plot of the campaign, at least), I'm still rather inept at making hooks work well, especially in the more open world I'm trying to present. Nonetheless, players generally make up for such DMing ineptitude by recognizing a plot hook when they see it (even if they haven't gotten enough justification for their characters to pursue it) and eventually biting just because they realize there's nothing else for them to do (which is helpful for the DM but obviously quite damaging for player immersion).

Once on the quest, however, the path became linear and things proceeded more smoothly. I tried to gradually introduce the aspects of 4E combat through the first encounter (with a bloodthorn vine and a group of bullywugs), and while the party rouge would wait until next session to figure out how sneak attack worked, everyone seemed to get a decent handle on how combat worked. I even managed to introduce some of the various types of terrain and obstruction (a favorite toy of mine).

Tools

This is my first time using miniatures; I bought some near the end of the school year simply because they were cool and cheap, and I only use them for player characters (or otherwise important characters that I don't have a token prepared for, such as the wizard's summoned fire warrior in the second session). I'm still somewhat split on the idea of minis: obviously they're cool-looking, but since there's intrinsically less choice than with custom tokens (especially when you have as few as I do) I worry that their image will overcome the internal image of the characters in a way that custom tokens don't. So far, however, this doesn't seem to be a problem, even with my players having barely experienced role-playing before.

I've continued to use custom tokens for enemies and NPCs. These are simply 1" wide washers (at their outside; washers are measured by the diameter of their interior hole, however, so buy accordingly) with images formatted with RPtools's Token Tool pasted on top. This time I've also added a second image on the bottom with a red ring to represent bloodied, which is both a nice visual reminder and a reward for players who enjoy flipping over the token when they bloody a monster. The images are also glued using liquid Elmer's Glue instead of a glue stick this time, which is much stronger (no more problems with images always falling off as we did with my first campaign) but also can cause warping and/or strange discolorations (my set of tokens for the second session all somehow ended up color-shifted green after gluing).

My combat maps are drawn on vellum graph paper left over from an old school project; the sheets are 11" by 17", marked off in one-inch squares, which is generally sizable enough for any normal arena and when folded in half fits neatly into a standard file folder. I generally create a general layout of a map on the computer with a tool such as Ye Olde Map Maker (an online flash program) and then transfer it to the paper pap and draw in details with pencil. For this campaign I've also begun retracing the pencil in pen and then erasing the pencil to make a cleaner look and maps that I can if necessary draw notes on in combat and not worry about erasing the underlying terrain.

I'm a storyteller. I see the world in stories. That's not saying much, because this is true of everyone. What is a story, after all? It's an organization of reality, an illusionary order imposed by our brains to make sense of the fundamentally nonsensical universe. So why say I'm a storyteller? Because it means something else to most people, and the difference between that meaning and my meaning is what I want to talk about. For those with some knowledge of narrative theory this won't be anything new or interesting, except maybe the stuff about video games and D&D later.

When most people think "story", they think a book, or a movie, or whatever. Words, images, a sequence of events experienced by and actions taken by characters, fictional or non. For most people, a story is a distinct entity, separate from them, that they may borrow for a time but that remains outside of them. If a story is in a forest and no one's around to read it, is it still a story? Most people say yes. The answer is no.

Well, not necessarily, because "story" is just a word and it means whatever you want it to mean, whatever meaning you endow it with, but there are other words for that sort of thing. "Text", usually: if a text is in a forest and no one's around to read it, is it still a text? Yes. (Well, actually, I would say no, because I think that all that really exists is the relationships between things and that the idea of "things" is just another false order constructed by our brains to make sense of nonsense, and so something without any relation to anything else doesn't exist, but that's for another time.) Unless you mean something else. But using a different word isn't the problem; the problem is that people don't accept that anything exists besides text. That, whatever you want to call it, there is something more than text.

Over lunch today I had an odd thought. I was considering what kind of people play D&D, and this is the list I came up with: the people who are interested in the math and statistics (call them the mathematicians), are the people who are interested in the social aspect (socializers), the people who enjoy the experience of the world and narrative (narrativists), and the people who can only think well of themselves when they're pretending to be a Level 50 Badass Motherfucker of Doom (the creepy fucks who get off on hitting on female NPCs and fucking with other PCs).

And then I realized that these on-the-spot categories map rather well to the four MMO player type model of Achievers (the mathematicians, who want to maximize their stats), Socializers (duh), Explorers (the narrativists, who want to experience the world), and Griefers (who want to dominate other players). Maybe I was just unconsciously influenced by my knowledge of the model, and the model itself is not particularly concrete, and my own player type list certainly holds little weight, but it's interesting nonetheless. I sort of wonder if these four player types rather correspond to generic types of people in general? Achievers are the businessmen interested in accomplishment for itself, Socializers are people people, Explorers are individualists, artists, creators, and Griefers are the jerks. Hmm.