Stealing, By the Numbers (IV)
Map of Warcraft's Shadowfang Keep
At about this point, I ran into another quandary with my adaptation of Shadowfang Keep. I’d eyeballed it at ten encounters, but, after four encounters in, I was running low on potential roleplaying encounters. There would inevitably be some roleplay before the confrontation with the archvillain Arugal, but aside from that, my options were limited: most of the remainder of the keep was filled with aggressive, borderline-feral worgen.
Ordinarily, I would simply have changed that fact, but I wanted to keep Shadowfang Keep relatively recognizable to the players who were familiar with it from Warcraft. On the other hand, six straight combat encounters would be at least a full session, and I can’t remember the last time I’ve had a full session of nothing but combat — it was probably back in the days of the B series modules. So I decided to proceed by trimming the number of encounters and trying to ensure that each one had an element to define it and set it apart. I also did what I could to add a little more roleplay to the second session by expanding the role of the undead.
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Stealing, By the Numbers (III)
Map of Warcraft's Shadowfang Keep
The courtyard of Shadowfang Keep, in Warcraft, is full of worgen, wolves, and undead servants. This was the first major change I made to the setting: given what I’d already decided about the two factions squaring off against each other, that simply wouldn’t work. Furthermore, the players would just have experienced two fights; a third one here would postpone the roleplaying encounter by another hour or so, according to my rule of thumb, and I wanted to get there fairly early.
I’d been considering putting a nightmare in the stables, with saddlebags that were a bag of holding, in a nod to the game; I discarded that idea. I took all of the enemies out of the courtyard, replacing them with the ghostly sentry crossbowmen I’d mentioned in my previous post, and a single dead worgen feathered with several bolts. I also eliminated the worgen boss Razorclaw the Butcher, since he didn’t fit in my Dungeons & Dragons version of Shadowfang Keep. Instead, I placed two ghostly servants (wraiths) in the kitchen area; these were unfriendly and suspicious toward the PCs, but not immediately hostile. The characters could attack them, and win fairly easily, but it would negatively impact the encounter that was to come.
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Stealing, By the Numbers (II)
Map of Warcraft's Shadowfang Keep
With the outline for my new players’ excursion to Shadowfang Keep complete, I next moved to what we used to call “stocking” the dungeon: placing monsters, treasure, and other elements inside and developing a map key.
To begin with, I needed to decide how long I wanted to make the dungeon. That seems a bit odd, given that I already had a map, but as experienced gamemasters will know, the size of the adventure area has little to do with how long it takes the players to explore it. That’s mostly determined by the number of encounters — a large map with very few encounters can be cleared in relatively little out-of-game time, while a small map with many encounters can take multiple game sessions.
I find a good rule of thumb is an hour per encounter. Some will take more, some will take less, but it tends to work out. Furthermore, in fourth edition, a character will gain a level after about ten encounters. I decided that Shadowfang Keep should be about ten encounters long, to allow each character to level up. That gave me a rule-of-thumb of ten hours “clear time,” or two to three sessions.
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Stealing, By the Numbers
One of the most useful pieces of advice new game masters often get is: steal. Take elements of myth, literature, movies, and anything else that you like, and find ways of using them in your game.
Recently I had an opportunity to demonstrate fourth edition Dungeons & Dragons for a couple of old friends, none of whom had ever roleplayed heavily. Most of them were, however, avid fans of massively-multiplayer online games. So given a session to try to hook them, I decided to steal from an MMORPG. Specifically, from World of Warcraft.
I didn’t have to think too hard about what to steal. My favorite low-level instance in the game is a castle infested by werewolf-like creatures and the ghosts of its former inhabitants… and ruled over by a mad wizard. Kind of stereotypical, maybe, but I love it.
My new players were going to Shadowfang Keep.
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Knights of the Old Republic: the MMO
Electronic Arts, which bought out Bioware a while ago, has just confirmed that the MMO project Bioware’s been working on since 2006 (and about which virtually nothing else was known) is an entry in the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic line.
KOTOR‘s been out of the spotlight lately. The first game came out in 2003, and its sequel in December 2004. The sequel (which was not developed by Bioware, since they were busy working on Jade Empire at the time) was criticized as being rushed and unfinished; there were plot threads that never quite resolved, subplots that were apparently dropped halfway through, and areas that were never completed. For all that, it was still one of my favorite games at the time.
I’m a bit ambivalent about this. As much as I like KOTOR, I can’t help but recall the first Star Wars MMO. While I have to admit I never played it and lack firsthand knowledge, my understanding is that it was fairly complicated at launch, with some questionable design choices (like requiring a long process of mastering random professions to unlock Jedi characters, who were then subject to permanent death) — and that it later underwent massive revisions, such as reductions in the number of available professions which angered many of its players.
These were the fault of the implementation, of course, not the Star Wars property. But the implementation was by Sony/Verant, so it’s not as though the developers were new to MMOs. I can picture EA/Bioware making similar mistakes.
On the other hand, Bioware has a pretty good record as far as I’m concerned. Baldur’s Gate, KOTOR, Jade Empire — good stuff. For the most part, I trust Bioware to know how to make an entertaining game.
Of course, if I were an Everquest player, I might have said the same about Verant regarding Galaxies.
I can say this: I feel more inclined to try this MMO than I did Galaxies.
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