LEGO Denuvien takes on a regular mini

Playing some 4E with some friends, will ramble about the experience afterwards!

Oooh, lego demon?

I'm sure according to lego this is an alien fire monster, but it looks like a demon to me...or maybe a fire elemental...I guess my players will find out soon enough...

Inventory

Our rogue, slightly oddly, is a little bit poorer than everyone else in the party.  

Our rogue never sells her gems.  She keeps every single one.  

This affectation suits her character well, since our "evil" rogue isn't very evil.  She gets along well, more or less, with the good and neutral party members.  She rarely kills people for kicks or giggles.  But if you told her that you hid a gem inside one of these 101 cute dalmatian puppies, you'd suddenly find yourself knee deep in puppy guts.  (And if you suddenly went all Cruella De Vile and decided to make a coat, I wouldn't bother, I'm sure the skins would be missing.  They are valuable after all.)

I can easily imagine her opening up her gem bag next to the fire, staring at the shiny rocks inside, her heart speeding up... all of her coldness to people being burned away by the firelight reflecting in her most prized possessions.

So that's not surprising.  What is surprising is what's happening with the player.  She keeps her inventory in a little notebook, and she has a page just for her gems.  I'm absolutely sure that if that notebook went missing, she'd be just as upset as if she'd lost the real gems.  (Also, since we play with Lego, if I put an actual lego gem down on the table, and she "finds" it, then she keeps it.)

Anyway.  I don't track inventory for my players.  And I don't really care about inventory much in our Lego game.  I don't care about it, because we aren't playing DnD as a survival game.  I think there's a lot of axis that you can plot types of DnD games on.  Wargame vs Interactive Storytelling, Railroading vs Sandbox, etc... but a big one is Grand Adventure vs Survival.  Our Lego game is definitely far, far into the grand adventure trope.  A small group of adventurers trying to save the world from certain doom.  It's them vs the world, so I want them to feel, and have, a lot of resources.  That's why it's okay that our barbarian has 15 swords and maces and spears.  She can't sit down, but whatever monster comes around the corner, she feels like she's prepared.  

Contrast this with a survival game.  In a survival game I'd care a lot about inventory.  And about loot.  In a survival game, every little decision has to matter, and careful preparation has to be key.  This puts a burden on me as a GM though too.  For one, I have to enforce that stuff.  Or at least make sure my players know I want it self-enforced.  But more importantly, I have to make an appropriate challenge.  The stakes may be huge, but the road the adventurer's travel has to be narrow.  

The full moon came out.  One of your companions is a werewolf.  Run.  Hide.  Survive.

The world will end in 4 days unless this object is placed in the center of this dungeon maze.  

In the Lord of the Rings, Gandalf and Aragorn were on an adventure.  Frodo and Sam were surviving.  "Go here, destroy the ring.  You have 4 lemba loaves, 2 daggers, and an elven chainmail vest.  Good luck."

The new Chima line has some pretty cool weapons.  My greedy loot hungry players claimed them (without even knowig what they were) as soon as I set the minis down on the map.

I escape being shamed, and my players encounter Vornheim for the first time...

Had a momentary panic that I accidentally named this blog "DND and Legos," which, of course, would have caused me incredible shame.  Thankfully, I didn't do that.

So, on to our adventures...
Our team stumbled onto a sorcerer opening a way gate to the elven homeland, and while they managed to slay him, they didn't do it before he got the gate open.  They quickly looted his still steaming corpse and ran for it before elven armies poured through into our dimension.  Among his sorcerly possession they found a book, which they lacked the skill to read.  Upon finding someone who could read it, they discovered that they'd need three other books to close the gate (because who puts their closing spells with their opening spells?  That would just be silly.)

So they are looking for the three books they need to close the gate and banish the elves (again.)

Hence they come to Vornheim.  If you aren't familiar with Vornheim, you can read about it, and buy it, here.

Vornheim is a city kit put together by Zak over at DND with Pornstars.  Previously I'd only used my own hand crafted campaign materials, and Paizos, so this is my first foray into 3rd party stuff.  So I want to talk a little bit about Vornheim as a campaign aid, then lego a bit, and I'll mix in the events of our game to illustrate my points.

So, some things about Vornheim.  It's not written for Pathfinder.  If you're playing Pathfinder, or 3.5 or 4E, it's not written with you in mind.  That said, it took me about 10 seconds to get the jist of what Zak was going for and make some modifications so it worked for us.  And keep in mind, I'm fairly new at this whole DND thing, so I'm sure most DM's could make it work between breaths.

In fact, my favorite thing about the module is that it's very very easy.  And the odd thing about that is, it's easy because of the things it leaves out.  A couple of times I found my asking "How is this supposed to work?  Does he event tell me how it's supposed to work?" and then, instead of trying to find page 113 graph B section C which may explain the minutiae of how it's supposed to work, I just made it work.  I can see how some people that would be a game breaker for them, but for me, the freedom of knowing "there may not be a rule for that," felt freeing rather than restricting.

Anyway, so my players walk north and find the strange city of Vornheim.  The mountains it is located in aren't generally known to be particularly cold, but around the city they've been transformed into a dark and ominous tundra.  They decide they need to find an inn, ask some questions, take a nap.

There happens to be a table on Inns (I didn't actually look for it, it just happened to be open when they asked about an inn), so I rolled up an Inn for them to stay at.  They quizzed the locals and drank rancid beer.  Our rogue won 40 gold playing pool, and was gifted a pool ball, wherein they found a mysterious key.

Sleep was had (with only a small inter dimensional interruption), then off they went to the most likely procurer of books, The Library of Zorlac.  Of course, the Library of Zorlac isn't a public library, but that didn't stop them from sneaking around looking for the book they want.  Puzzled were solved and fights were had, and our casters have so far avoided burning the place to the ground...

Awesome MOC

Check out this amazing LOTR Inn of the Prancing Pony that was posted on Reddit.  Someday my set pieces for DND are going to look like this.. someday when I'm richer...

I couldn't find the original MOC'er, so if anyone knows who actually built this beauty, please comment.

Awesome Fantasy Minis in Series 9

If you're more into the DND side of life (as opposed to the Lego side) you may not know about the mini-figure blind packs.  They come in little baggies that look like this:

Each little packet has one minifigure.  The series 9 figures look like this:

Which include a bunch of awesome figures for DnD.  I'm particularly in love with the gypsy and the little cyclops.  You can buy the blind packs online all over (Amazon Link), but for our purposes I'd either buy them in the store, since with a little work it's easy enough to feel through the bag and buy the figures you actually want, "blind pack" be damned.

Usually the bags sell for about 3 bucks, which is about the average price for minis, but with the blind packs you can often find  the more common figures cheaper, since collectors buy the whole box to get the rares (which we DND players may have no interest in), and then sell off the commons cheap.

The "Forest Maiden" and the "Heroic Knight" fight off a LotR troll.

Also, I need to read more random gaming blogs, like this one.

I just NEED to make that War Litter out of Lego, and sick it on my players...

Back-story is your friend

I had a great moment last weekend that, at least for me, proved the maxim that "A solid backstory is more useful than a million stats."

We only had two encounters:  One, a random encounter while journeying... and the dice (well, an online random encounter generator) selected... a young green dragon... I quickly decided his motive was simply hunger, quickly read his stats, and we're fighting... and I'm reviewing stats.... and we're fighting... and I'm looking over abilities... and we're fighting, and I'm trying to decide if my players creative solution might work... back and forth, back and forth.

The second encounter was the one I "planned."  And by planned, I mean I knew my players would be heading to talk to NPC-Z, to get information about Macguffin-X*... I wanted to use the lego bride minifigure, and I wanted an NPC that was probably friendly, but had a weird twist and could go badly for the players... I remembered another bride (Zack Smith's Hollow Bride), so I stole a lot of the idea from that, and decided that NPC-Z had been replaced by an interdimensional traveler who really really wanted to socialize and make friends, but who had a really nasty temper and would freak out and revert to her natural form (the hollow bride) if the players offended her.

The face of evil-ish.

So of course the rogue looked up her dress.  And got caught.  And couldn't bluff her way out of it.

Battle ensued.    

There were 7 creatures involved in this battle, and figuring out what they'd do and why, was about 100x easier than the "simple" dragon battle.  And in both situations I spent about 30 seconds looking over their stats, but in the latter, I knew why the monster was doing what she was doing, and that meant the stats were secondary to the story I wanted to tell, and I worked less.

So note for self:  Next random encounter, spend an extra minute and make up a quick backstory.

*The gang found an elvish wizard, he managed to open a planes gate between earth and fairy.  They managed to kill him and steal his tome, but they don't have the skills to understand it.  They took it to the NPC who explained she needed 3 other tomes to figure out how to close the gate (of course.)   I know, Troperific.