Dungeon Delve
Just ran my most current installment of the "Shadows Over Khorvaire", and being hard pressed for time, I grabbed a complete "encounter" from the recently published "Dungeon Delve" as a filler for my usually planned out game encounters. I have to say, I was a bit hesitant at first, but the players genuinely enjoyed the encounters and the feel of the encounters.
The format for each chapter in the book consists of a series of encounters for a given level. In my case, I used the "Orken Stronghold" from the book. Prep time for the session was easy, with stats and tactics provided for each encounter. I had already worked on a treasure allotment for the party, so I simply replaced the included treasure with my "parcels". One of the great things that dawned on me over the course of play is how badly I had been pacing combat and encounters. This book was a real eye-opener for how to properly scale out a series of adventures. I'm going back to the drawing board with my adventures and encounters and plotting them out using this book as a guideline.
There are some seriously wicked encounters in the book, and even the offer for how to expand them out in to full-blown "adventures" rather than just a packaged, yet random encounter. I'm genuinely pleased with this and would recommend it greatly to the time-pressed GM out there.
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October 23rd, 2009 - 08:10
My group has used various dungeon delves as part of our ongoing campaign as well as one-off adventures when the main game is on a break. I think we’ve played about half of the adventures mixed evenly throughout heroic, paragon and epic tiers.
We also had a lot of success using the delves as a testing ground for new characters. As new classes, races, powers, feats, and paragon paths become available we’ll create new characters and then try them out using one of the dungeon delves. Not only is it a good change from our ongoing campaign, but it gives us a really good idea of how these new classes work. We’ve already found that some classes sound cool, but in practical game terms don’t behave like we expected them too. The reverse is also true.
Dungeon Delves is a great resource and extremely easy to use. The maps are available for download from the Wizards website (without the monsters appearing) which makes mapping a breeze. I don’t know if Wizards is planning to put out Dungeon Delves 2, but I’d puck it up in a heartbeat.
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