Everything You Need To Know About Mind Flayers

The mind flayer, also known as an "illithid", is one of the coolest, most "D&D" monsters out there. They have tentacle heads, they have psychic powers, and they eat brains. In most games, when the heroes run into a mind flayer, the players break into a sweat. They are powerful, dangerous, disgusting... and weird.

We are going to go over the mind flayer of each edition, and then look at a few products and articles that can help give you a feel for how mind flayers can be used in your game. There is so much material on them that I can only highlight what I feel is the best and most interesting stuff out there.

I do these articles because as a DM, it is time-consuming to do this research. There is so much cool stuff spread over so many editions that can make your game better. I like to try to collect it all into one concise document so that you can get the most out of the creature. There is nothing worse than when you've run a campaign using some monster and when it's all over you stumble on a sourcebook that would have made it five times better.

Out of everything, the one product I would suggest that you check out is The Illithiad. That book is brimming over with creativity, and somehow it has been completely overlooked in the D&D community.

AD&D 1st Edition

- They detest sunlight
- They consider "humanity" to be cattle
- If it hits you with a tentacle attack, it reaches your brain in d4 rounds and... you die. Then it eats your brain. Good gawd.
- They can dominate you magically.
- "It is also rumored that these monsters have a city somewhere deep beneath the earth."
- They have mind blast, but it is not detailed. I guess mind blast was one of the 1e psionic powers in the player's handbook. I believe Gary Gygax would later state that he regretted putting psionics in the PH, because they were not fully developed.
- There is this odd little cartoon of a mind blast..

AD&D 2nd Edition

- This mind flayer is drawn by the great Tony DiTerlizzi. It's probably not the definitive take on the monster, but it's pretty good.
- This monster has 90% magic resistance. NINETY PERCENT.
- In this version, mind flayers have no spoken language. They communicate telepathically which is accompanied by "hissing".
- Mind Blast: A 20 foot cone that stuns you for 3d4 rounds. It then will try to grab a stunned victim and run of with them.
- This version can plane shift and charm, and there's a few different ways for it to extract a brain in d4 rounds.
- Each illithid has 2 charmed slaves.
- Mind Flayer communities are run by elder brains, a pool of briny fluid that contains the brains of the city's dead mind flayers. It has a telepathic range of 2-5 miles, and can warn mind flayers of the presence of thinking creatures. Your heroes are doomed if they think they can sneak up on one of these places.
- They spend their days arguing about the best ways to conquer the Underdark, and they inflict pain on their captives for amusement.
- They spend their first 10 years of life as tadpoles, and live to the age of about 125.
- Illithids are hermaphroditic. They produce two tadpoles in their lives.
- They have a suite of psionic powers from the 2e Complete Psionics Handbook. Fun Fact: The name of this blog comes from that book. A "power score" is when you roll exactly the number you need when using a psionic power. It's like a critical hit.

D&D 3rd Edition

- While it is not my favorite, the artistic depiction of the mind flayer in this book is pretty much their iconic, fully-realized look. Black robes, skulls, and a big villainous collar. There is also a Wayne Reynolds painting of a mind flayer sorcerer which is beyond awesome (I couldn't squeeze it into this article, which is already overloaded with art).
- They are completely self-serving, and will think nothing of deserting their allies in the face of danger.
- Mind blast still stuns for 3d4 rounds.
- It uses the complicated grapple rules for each tentacle. Once all four tentacles are grappling the target, the brain can be extracted.
- They have a handy section on tactics. Here's how they suggest that a mind flayer fight go down:
Round 1: Mind Blast
Round 2: Charm a non-stunned foe (I guess the flayer could either run off with the charmed one, or have the charmed guy stab his or her fallen comrades!)
Round 3: Order charmed foes to protect you. Or plane shift away (Can you plane shift while carrying a stunned foe?! Man...)
Round 4: Eat Brains

D&D 4th Edition

- In this edition, it is explicitly stated that mind flayers come from the Far Realm.
- Mind Blast dazes enemies, and mind flayers are invisible to dazed creatures. Yikes. Of course, invisible in 4e is tricky. Depending on your DM, invisibility is basically just a -5 to hit and no line of sight.
- The "bore into brain" power does 3d6+5 damage and dazes. If the target drops to 0 HP, the brain is eaten. This is amusing because doing 3d6+5 damage to a 12th level PC isn't exactly going to drop them to 0 HP in a few rounds. I should probably look at the Monster Vault version of this monster...

(OK, here is the Monster Vault version....)
- They re-use the 3.5 art. It's a pretty definitive depiction, but it still rubs me the wrong way when they re-use art like this (unless it is truly epic).
- Mind flayers are attempting to create the perfect slave race.

- "Mind flayers use other creatures to reproduce. They implant a juvenile illithid inside a victim's skull, where the tadpole-shaped offspring eats the creature's brain". Yeearrgggh. The pic to the right from Lords of Madness gives me the heebie jeebies.
- Mind Blast still dazes, but dominates on a critical.
- They can burn an action point to potentially get this combination off in one round: Tentacles attack does 3d6+5 and grabs. Then, Manipulate Brain does 4d6+10 and stuns the target!
- It also has powers over thralls. It can use a minor action to make a thrall attack. It can teleport a thrall when it is about to be hit with a melee attack.
- There's other mind flayer monsters in each book, I'm just giving you the lowest level "baseline" version. Otherwise we'd be here all day.
- It says the ultimate goal of the mind flayers is to take over all of the planes and reshape them in the Far Realm's image.

D&D 5th Edition (Well... final playtest version)

- As of this writing, the Monster Manual isn't out yet. So, we'll take a look at the version of the mindflayer in the final playtest packet.
- It seems a bit weak at first glance: AC 13, 44 HP.
- It has advantage on saves vs magic, and can use telepathy within 100 feet. It can auto-sense the thoughts of intelligent creatures within 100 feet. That's pretty cool.
- Mind Blast: 60 foot cone, fail your save means that you take 13 damage and you're stunned for one minute! That's more like it. You get a save at the end of each of your rounds to shake it off.
- It can grapple with its' tentacle attack, and then can extract brain with a +7 to hit. Hit: It devours your brain. Wow.

The whole brain-eating thing is so gruesome. It's very 80's horror. It really sets the mind flayers apart from other creatures.

Dragon Magazine #78 - Ecology of the Mindflayer

I hate the ecologies written in short story form. I'm going to try and wade through this thing. Here's the details gleaned:

- Mind flayers wander the planes.
- Bright light overwhelms their visual nerves and leaves them in agony - it can't even use psionic powers. It is helpless. Yeah, I don't know if you want to implement this. One light spell will nullify your mind flayer encounter.
- The illithid cities don't generally have stairs, because they can levitate.
- Their cities are lit by patches of glowing spores. Their guardian creatures include wererats, beholders and grimlocks - creatures they wouldn't eat.

This article wasn't so bad, though not especially useful. The story is about a githyanki telling a party of heroes about mindflayers. Once the PCs mention the githzerai, the githyanki flips out and tries to kill them.

We should probably talk about them a bit. Basically, the gith forerunners were this slave race of the mind flayers. They revolted and escaped. their leader, Gith, wanted to wage an Eternal Crusade against the mind flayers. Some members of the gith race wanted nothing to do with this and left. The dissenters evolved into githzerai. The crusaders evolved into githyanki.

Githyanki: Warriors who live in the astral plane, originally led by a woman known as Gith. Gith's soul has, I believe, been trapped in hell and is one of Dispater's prize possessions. The githyanki are ruled by a lich-queen named Vlaakith. The githyanki scour the planes, hunting illithid.

Githzerai: Kung fu monks who worship their ancestor Zerthimon.

The githyanki had an alliance with red dragons. This pact was shattered in the 4e Scales of War adventure path, but I'm not sure if that is going to stick or not. So basically, you can have githyanki riding red dragons in the astral plane if you want.

The other enemy of the illithid is the drow, obviously. They fight over underdark real estate. Plus, brains.

Dragon Magazine #150 - The Sunset World

This is another short story sort-of article about mind flayers. Some guy who travels the planes is giving a talk on mindflayers. It is pretty dry. Here is an excerpt:

"Our Monzari guides brought two lean, doglike creatures they called szarkel. The szarkel are imposing and graceful beasts, but difficult to control; we found them to be a great hindrance and nuisance. We will present you with a short monograph on the breed and its affinities; I recommend that you attend that meeting, for reasons that will become clear."

Yes, please, by all means send me a monograph about the szarkel.

- The Sunset World is also known as Ssirik Akuar. I get the impression the planet doesn't rotate. The dim, red sun doesn't cross the sky. It just gets smaller and bigger over the course of 20 weeks.
- The Sunset World has lots of oozes and fungi.
- It is explained that when a mind flayer's tentacles wrap around your head, a sub-tentacle detaches and burrow into your skull. once it touches the brain, it causes instant death. Some of the illithid's mouth parts serve as bonesaws.
- The illithids have a slave-race that are like baboons.

Not much there. Lots of pages though.

AD&D 2nd Edition Ravenloft -  Thoughts of Darkness

In second edition, there was a Ravenloft adventure that was all about... mind flayer vampires! I ran it, and it was so difficult that my group fled after the very first encounter. The PCs were super-powerful, but I had underestimated these monsters in a major way.

The elder brain in this adventure recruited the aid of a descendant of Strahd - her name is Lyssa Von Zarovich.

Here's how you make an illithid vampire: Take some dude, insert a mind flayer egg into him, then have a vampire bite him. The mindflayer egg grows and explodes out, and you got yourself a vampire mind flayer tadpole.

- Vampire illithid are wildly insane and uncontrollable.

AD&D 2nd Edition - The Illithiad

I mentioned this briefly in my article about The Best Adventures of All Time. In that, I discussed the mind flayer trilogy by Bruce Cordell. The Illithiad is also by Bruce Cordell, and contains an astonishing amount of ideas and material for illithids.

- Ceremorphosis: When you stick an illithid tadpole in a helpless humanoid's ear, and it burrow into their brain, eats it and melds with it. The body slowly transforms into that of a mindflayer. Only certain humanoid races are acceptable for this process, such as humans, elves, orcs, etc. Halflings, dwarves, and giants (!) are not.

- Collapse Time: This is a psionic power some mind flayers have. They can crystallize time, forming a dollop of thick material called quintessence. Stuff coated in quintessence is protected from the ravages of time.

- Imprint Psionic Circuitry: Some mind flayers have this power, where they can imprint items or people with "psionic circuitry". The circuitry can store psionic energy (PSPs in 2nd edition), create dimensional portals, etc.

Illithids sometimes imprint psionic seals on objects or people. They have all sorts of effects, like allowing you to heal 2d10 hit points once per day, reflecting a spell back on its' caster (!) once per week, or acting as a skeleton key once per day.

- The God of the Illithids: Ilsensine, a giant green brain. It has a trusty sidekick/exarch named Lugribossk.

- The Elder Concord: Each illithid community is ruled by a collection of mind flayers, who belong to the different creeds (factions).

- The Creeds: Mind Flayers are members of different factions. These are:
The Creatives: They make psionic/magic items.
Tha Awaiters: Long-term schemers. Believe that Law guides Chaos.
The Possessors: They want to acquire wealth.
The Tamers: Warrior illithids.
The Thorough Biters: They believe that learning new concepts only occurs through failure.
The Nourishers: These are almost thrall-sympathizers. They take care of thralls and make sure they are not "taken for granted".

The Abysmal: They believe in making sure other races regard illithids with terror and disgust.
The Influencers: Unearth secrets
The Darkeners: They are always looking for ways to extinguish suns.
The Gatherers: They want to combine the scattered illithid communities.
The Arisers: They wants to dominate the surface world in spite of the sunlight.
The Venerators: Priests of Ilsensine.

Qualith: Their written language. It's sort of like braille, with lines instead of dots. They run their four tentacles over the lines to read.

There's tons more, including magic items, a complete illithid community, and stats for all sorts of creatures, including cranium rats and brain golems. In my opinion, this is the book you need to get the most out of mind flayers and really use them well in your campaign.

D&D 3rd Edition - Lords of Madness: The Book of Aberrations

This 3.5 book details certain creatures extensively, including aboleths, beholders and mind flayers. The mind flayer section kind of rehashes a lot of information from earlier editions. There is some nice art and a few nuggets of wisdom.

- Elder Brains can make brain golems out of the brains of intelligent creatures and "an extruded portion of its' own mass". They often serve as an elder brain's physical "hands". Mind flayers regard them with awe.

- The book has a very detailed mind flayer city, called Lagurno, and a fully-fleshed out mind flayer lair. Both of these are basically entire adventures for you to use.

AD&D 1st Edition - Expedition to the Barrier Peaks

I feel the need to include this as well. This is an adventure where your heroes come across... a crashed spaceship. You could access different parts of the ship through the use of colored cards. One creature on this ship is a mind flayer.

You, the DM, are going to have to figure out how you want to portray the mind flayers in your game. Are they from the mad Far Realm? Do they travel the planes, enslaving and devouring worlds? Do they fly through space on magic spelljammer ships? Or are they a technological space race?

That would be the one drawback to The Illithiad. Some of the items in there might be too "sci fi" for some DMs and players. All I can say is, don't let it scare you off. Use what feels right and change or ignore what you don't like. There is a mountain of great material here. Make it your own!

And don't forget to check out this goofy cartoon.

Tyranny of Dragons - Hoard of the Dragon Queen: The First Official Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Adventure

After years of playtesting, Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition products are finally hitting the shelves. Today I want to take a look at the first adventure - Hoard of the Dragon Queen.

• The first portion of this article is about the authors, the concept of "Downtime", and Adventurer's League stuff. 
• Then we'll get into a brief synopsis and examination of each episode of Hoard.
• At the end, I will address some common criticisms of the adventure.

You can buy this adventure on amazon here:

Hoard of the Dragon Queen (D&D Adventure)

The first thing to notice about Hoard is the fact that this adventure was "farmed out". Wizards employees did not write this. It was handed off to Kobold Press authors Wolfgang Baur and Steve Winter.
 

Wolfgang Baur wrote some epic 2nd edition stuff, and was heavily involved in Dungeon Magazine way back when. He was one of my favorite authors. He did a lot of Planescape stuff, and wrote one of my favorite Al Qadim boxed sets - Secrets of the Lamp.

Steve Winter is a guy who had been involved with D&D for eons. He worked on Star Frontiers, the 1983 World of Greyhawk boxed set, and even the old TSR Marvel Superheroes game. I love the color chart system.

It is fascinating to me that Wizards' new approach is to go to big name "outsiders" to make their adventure stuff. Did they consider having Paizo write an adventure path for 5e? How insanely awesome would that be? Would Wizards of the Coast ask Monte Cook Games to write an adventure? Imagine that - 5e adventures written by Monte Cook and Bruce Cordell. That would be epic.

Downtime

I am going to cover how downtime works in an official Adventurers' League game. If you are running this as part of the Encounters program, you should check out page 5 of the Adventurer's League Player's Guide (found here) and page 3 of the Hoard of the Dragon Queen Encounters pdf (which is obtained through your game store).

At the start of an Encounters session, players must declare if they are spending any downtime, which is recorded on their logsheet. In the Encounters program, you can use downtime to craft, practice a profession, recuperate, and train.

Downtime is a new concept for this edition. It is an abstract way to handle stuff the PCs do in town in a simple, swift fashion. You could run this and hand-wave the days in town, or if your players like, you could play it out and you will probably end up with some interesting stuff.

Downtime is discussed on page 68 of the basic rules. Here are the things you can do in an Encounters game:

Crafting: If you have artisan tools, you can make one or more items worth up to 5 gold per day, expending raw material worth half of its' value. So, you spend 2.5 gold to make a 5 gold item. You can take days and months to make a single valuable item, like plate mail. It costs 1500 gp, so you'd pay 750 gp and take 300 days to make it.

There are rules on having other people help you with crafting, making the time speed up. Immediately I wonder if it is allowed to have a bunch of NPC allies do it for you. It is things like this that probably caused Shawn Merwin to write this blog post about players who try to "break the game".
 

Practice a Profession: You can work at a temple or thieves' guild. This allows you to live a modest lifestyle without paying for it. (Lifestyles are a whole other thing - basically, you pay a set cost that covers your characters' living situation and how fancy their home is).

Recuperating: After 3 days of downtime, make a DC 15 CON save. Make it, and you can do one of two things:

1. End an effect that prevents you from gaining hit points. Judging from Dead in Thay, there are a ton of monsters that reduce your maximum hit points. This will probably come up fairly often.

2. Gain advantage on saving throws versus one disease or poison currently affecting you.

Research: This is all pretty much determined by the DM. Each day of research costs you 1 gp.

Train: Learn a language or train with tools. Find an instructor and then spend... 250 days and 250 gold. Wow! I like this, as it makes campaigns take years and years in game, and provides opportunities for the characters to get into hijinks in the city during the months they are spending downtime.

How odd is this: at the end of each "episode" of this adventure, the PCs are awarded 10 downtime days, which "can be spent immediately or saved for later use". So.. some PCs spend 10 days making armor, and others spend none doing nothing? 

In the Adventurers League version of this game, XP is tracked individually. PCs do not auto-level at certain parts of the story. One thing that won't go over well is the concept of Maximum XP. PCs have a cap on how much XP they can earn in each episode.

Remember, DMs, you may hear this classic refrain come from your players' lips: "It's not fair". Resist the urge to remind them that they are getting emotional about numbers on a piece of paper in an elaborate game of Cops and Robbers while people all over the world are struggling to find food and a safe place to sleep each day. Do not, under any circumstance, scream at them "Life is not fair!", partly because you will look like a psycho, but mainly because it will not sink in. That's the 20% of your player pool you just have to make the best of.

Hoard of the Dragon Queen

Now we get into the DM stuff. If you are a player, there's spoilers in here. Don't ruin your own fun. If you want to read about more player stuff, check out my run-down of the player's guide here.

There's these 5 dragon masks. If the bad guys get them all and combine them, they form a single mask that can free Tiamat from Hell. The leaders of the cult are called... uh.. the Wearers of Purple. Like Prince, I guess.

The Cult and it's dragons are now attacking places to get the masks and to assemble a treasure hoard worthy of Tiamat. That's pretty cool.

Episode 1: Greenest in Flames

The whole adventure starts off with a bang. The heroes are heading to a town called Greenest, which is under attack by a blue dragon and the cult!
 

Here is where we see just how loose this whole thing is. Basically, we DMs are given "missions" to give the PCs. Some are short, some are long. One session should contain either one long encounter or two short ones.

This is such a radical departure from previous seasons. I kind of wonder if newer DMs will be able to roll with this.

This whole scenario is pretty awesome. The heroes help defend the town and even have to drive off the blue dragon (once it takes 24 damage it flies off - it will probably take down a PC or two before that).

Episode 2: Raiders' Camp

This chapter is only supposed to take 2 or 3 sessions (it took us one!). Our heroes track down the enemy camp and, if possible, recover stolen valuables. The heroes are also asked to rescue an abducted monk.

Once the heroes deal with a rear guard encounter and an ambush (which my group avoided entirely), our heroes come upon the dragon forces' main camp. Creeping around the enemy camp isn't hard, but if they are recognized, the PCs will be outnumbered. There's about 180 cultists there total.. not exactly a place that the adventurers can just attack.

There's this monk prisoner here that is meant to be freed, though he oddly begs not to be freed. It's a little awkward. The monk plays into The Rise of Tiamat so... yeah.

The camp is pretty cool. I think wizards is doing a great job delivering interesting, "pure" fantasy scenarios for their published adventures. Nothing too out there, just classic fleshed-out fantasy tropes.

Episode 3: Dragon Hatchery
 

What player doesn't love dragon eggs? The adventurers return to the camp. Most of the army has moved on, but a few enemies remain. They can explore a dragon hatchery in a cave populated with some of my least favorite monsters - stirges and troglodytes. Stirges suck! Pun intended. But seriously... they're lame.

This dungeon was very well-received by my group. It has a lot of different rooms, including a fungus forest (which I always love). There's some tough battles in here. Frulam Mondath may give the heroes some trouble, depending on how things play out.

There are also some cool traps in this place. And there's the eggs! The eggs are black dragon eggs. "If an egg is simply cracked open, the infant dragon struggles for breath, cries and squirms like a human baby for a few minutes, and then dies." That's, uhh... let's just back away slowly and close the door on that little scenario.

Episode 4: On the Road

In this section, our heroes go undercover and sign on to a caravan that the cult has also infiltrated. The cult is using the caravan to smuggle the stolen loot to their headquarters. Our heroes' job is to go along for the ride and find out where this hoard is being taken to.

It is a ridiculously long journey (60 days!). There's some cool NPCs, a fun "work for a caravan boss" gimmick, and some very good encounters (my favorite one involves sprouting fungi).

But this episode needs to be run with care. I can see players getting really bored with this if it feels like it is dragging.

Additionally, the whole scenario doesn't make a lot of sense. The bad guys have a flying castle! Why not just have the castle come to the loot? Right?

Episode 5: Construction Ahead
 

We get to Waterdeep, an iconic Forgotten Realms city, and there are no encounters there. It definitely feels like the authors needed more pages to flesh out this adventure.

Believe it or not, our heroes must continue to follow the cult and their treasure even further north. The adventurers will likely sign on to another caravan.

The journey ends at a roadhouse, which is pretty forgettable. Ultimately, our heroes discover a tunnel.

The trail of this treasure, the titular Hoard of the Dragon Queen: It goes through a hidden caravan, into a roadhouse, through a tunnel to a swamp carried by lizardfolk, through the swamp to a castle, through a portal in the castle to a hunting lodge, lugged 5 miles north of the lodge to Parnast, and at last from Parnast to Castle Skyreach.

Episode 6: Castle Naerytar

The adventurers have to figure out how to get through a castle which is inhabited by the cult and two factions - bullywugs and lizardfolk. It can be handled many different ways. It is complex, but much better than the previous chapter. There's a lot of fun to be had in the swamp and in the castle.

Episode 7: Hunting Lodge

We come to a hunting lodge which many PCs might just skip entirely. The lodge has a disillusioned cultist inside. There's also a very cool four-armed troll. Ultimately, though, this feels like a side-trek.

Episode 8: Castle in the Clouds

The flying castle! A very fitting finale, full of major villains to defeat - red wizards, Rezmir and a dragon. There's a cheap gimmick that makes it likely that the PCs won't get their hands on the black dragon mask, which I didn't appreciate. Our heroes finally get some magic items, though. This adventure is very stingy when it comes to magic items.

That's it! From there, our heroes continue on into the second adventure - The Rise of Tiamat.

Criticism of Hoard of the Dragon Queen

I am reading a thread on ENWorld called "Why is Hoard of the Dragon Queen such a bad adventure?" and I feel the need to address some of the criticisms. I've run the entire adventure, so I feel that I can speak from experience.

It's a Railroad

This is true, but that is the case with most published adventures. Your players have to be willing to run into a village that is under attack by an army in order for this adventure to work.

The Adventure Puts PCs in Impossible Situations

There are a few instances of this:

• Dueling Cyanwrath: This is meant to make the PCs hate him and relish taking him down in episode 3.
• Fighting the Blue Dragon: The PCs are not aware that it will flee. I'd encourage DMs to place a ballista on the wall.
• The Roper: In Episode 2, this guy looked tough. He's meant to be fed.
• Episode 4's Assassins: In Episode 4, there's an inn with disguised assassins who are way too powerful for the PCs to fight. This was an error by the authors due to the changing nature of the rules as they developed the product
• Assault on Castle Naerytar: Your PCs might be doomed if they try to just rush the Castle. With dozens of lizardfolk and bullywugs outside the castle, it should be obvious that they'll need to be cautious.
• Talis the White: In the lodge, the PCs might end up fighting Talis and almost all of the monsters in the Lodge at once (though she'd likely throw the PCs in the prison rather than kill them)
• Attacking Castle Skyreach: If the PCs try to rush the front gate of Skyreach while it's on the ground at night, they're fighting 6 ogres, Rezmir, 2 drakes and a vampire.

The PCs Won't Get Enough XP To Level Properly

This is true. If you don't auto-level your PCs after each episode, there will be issues. The PCs will likely get a metric ton of XP in episode 1, but will get very little in episode 2. Episode 5 is light on XP, and Episode 7 theoretically could net them 0 XP. Episode 8 is not easy. You don't want your heroes showing up at the castle one or two levels lower than they should be.

The Adventure Requires a Lot of Prep Work

True! This partly depends on how you prep your games. Just the fact that the monster stats are not in the book will likely lead to some amount of prep work on your part.

You'll also need to plan out episode 4, and you'll need to have a very good understanding of Castle Naerytar in order to run it successfully.

The Villains Aren't Memorable

This depends on the DM. I think that Rezmir is a great villain. Rezmir's awesome evil sword alone makes her cool and threatening. The PCs can spot her in episode 2, walking in slow motion in the camp, drooling acid. They might get a shot at her in episode 6 amidst the chaos of lizardfolk slaughtering bullywugs, and then finally go to war with her in episode 8. Azbara Jos makes a good flunky, though he could use some fleshing out.

The Cult of the Dragon is pretty cool, too. They have their own little hand signal and catchphrase. They have cool titles for different ranks of officers. Heck, their gear is even depicted in their artwork. I've seen some people further flesh out the cult, by having the cultists devote themselves to a different color of dragon, which is an awesome idea. So some cultists wear red, some wear green, etc.

Overall

When our game store ran 4e encounters, attendance started high and dropped off quickly. Same with other events like the Pathfinder Society. Since we started running Hoard in the store, we grew from 2 tables to 4 and the expansion continues.  The players all love Hoard of the Dragon Queen as well as 5th edition. I can't think of a more clear indicator that this adventure is worth running than that.

I like that the first adventure for the new edition features dragons, as well as a dungeon. Tiamat is one of the best D&D villains. Overall, it feels like they are getting off on the right foot.

Check out my extremely detailed review of the sequel to this adventure, The Rise of Tiamat, here.

White Plume Mountain - Blackrazor in D&D 5th Edition

I have returned from another successful event at the game store. I am filling the gap in the Dungeons & Dragons Encounters schedule by converting the 1st edition adventure White Plume Mountain to 5th edition.

Last week, our heroes barely survived the frictionless room, with its' pits full of rusty razorblades that gave you super-tetanus! The dwarf was infected. "Where the heck is the cure disease spell", I wondered. I forgot - cure disease is bundled into a 2nd level spell called Lesser Restoration, which also heals blindness and other stuff.

When I got to the store, there were zero players. ZERO. I wondered if maybe this would be the dreaded session where absolutely no-one showed up.
 

Slowly, they trickled in. They continued to trickle. I had 8 players. Two more popped in just to say hi, they couldn't stay. So, yeah, I breathed a sigh of relief all around.

This group is comprised of the teen-aged "old guard", starring Hack and Slash Guy and Brony. Hack and Slash Guy likes to run up and hack. Brony is usually more focused on eating Wendy's than running his dwarf. Like I've said before, this Encounters game is sort of like running an after-school program.

But now, there is a new faction. There are four people who have.. gasp... read the rules! Printed them out! Leveled their characters beforehand! And they don't want to go into every encounter with guns blazing. Tonight, this new extremist faction openly talked about this situation and actually considered splitting up the party in the dungeon. That would be... amazing.

They didn't do that tonight though. No, all 8 of them went through one of the most iconic D&D rooms in RPG history:

Room 26 - The Terraced Room:

This room is hard to describe, so I have included lots of pictures. The room is terraced, with a series of giant "steps" leading to the center of the room. On each step-level is a different bunch of creatures. A few levels have a glass retaining wall that holds in water. The monsters from top to bottom:
 

6 Giant Crayfish
6 Giant Scorpions
4 Sea Lions
3 Manticores (wings clipped)

I ran this once as a kid and made a total mockery of it. I didn't know what I was doing. This was my chance to redeem myself!

I was a little worried. Couldn't the PCs just pick off the monsters with ranged attacks? Would this end up a disappointment?

Of course not. Hack and Slash charged, jumped into the water with the six crayfish and began banging his head against a glass wall, trying to shatter it. In the adventure text it is stated that a PC with an 18 strength can break the glass in 2-5 blows. In case you weren't sure, Hack and Slash indeed has an 18 STR.

The cleric jumped in with him. Both of them wear plate armor. Both sunk under the water. It was only ten feet deep, but it was still quite amusing.

The new players fanned out like a swat team, sniping the manticores. The manticores returned fire with their tail spikes. The wizard dropped a pair of fireballs on them and wiped them out.

Hack and Slash shattered the wall and, of course, spilled down the terrace into a pile of scorpions. From here we had a chaotic melee where there was much leap-stabbing.

With the room cleared, the adventurers expertly disarmed a tap and looted a safe. Then, they soldiered on to attempt to acquire an iconic D&D artifact:

Room 26 - Blackrazor:
 

There's a halfling in here, who is actually an ogre mage in disguise. Why, I don't know. I had him tell them about Blackrazor, and how he wouldn't touch it. This made them paranoid. They literally ended up poking the sword with a stick on two occasions.

The ogre mage revealed his true form. I had statted him out using a lot of the lich stats from Dead In Thay, including legendary actions. The party took him down. The Brony ended up with blackrazor! I did not expect that at all.

You'd think I'd be used to it by now, but I still am shocked by how little we got done. I am not even sure if we will finish this adventure. We still have two artifacts to go.

It was a good session. The group is becoming too large. A split may be in order. If the Adventurer's League draws in new players, we may end up running 2 or 3 tables each week.

My Shadowrun game is rolling along nicely. We had our second session last Sunday. We sort of have the basic rules down and now I am doing a lot of reading, compiling a list of old Shadowrun adventures that are worth running. I am very amused by the idea of running a "retro future-wave" game of Shadowrun, with wristphones and dot matrix printouts.

I am preparing to run Queen Euphoria in a few weeks. I'll also probably run Mercurial, Elven Fire and Dreamchipper. It's funny, the more I read about Shadowrun, the more it feels like a detective kind of game. There's a lot of "legwork" and investigation. It is a fun change of pace. Plus I love roleplaying everyone smoking cigarettes.

The Balance Blade - Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG

Our DCC World Tour 2014 campaign continues to demolish all in its' path, a mighty golden juggernaut gobbling up swag and leaving poor doomed characters in its' wake.

Tonight, we finished up the final battle from The Sea Queen Escapes, did some downtime in Gnatdamp (the town from Gygax Magazine #1), and then went through a level 2 adventure known as The Balance Blade.

The final battle with the Sea Queen was... too hard. The party had 8 PCs. The cleric went down right away from a gigantic magic missile.

In DCC RPG, you roll on a chart when you cast your spell. The higher you roll, the better the effect. So the Sea Queen cast magic missile, rolled high, and thus launched a massive pulse beam of a missile right at the cleric doing 4d12+5 damage! Most characters have about 20 hit points. He was down and dying (he ended up being stabilized).

The players came up with a clever plan, forcing a potion down her throat, causing her and her handmaidens to flee.

The heroes took their white and gold boat home and rested for three months, regaining spellburned stat points, healing wounds, and doing miscellaneous magic things.

One wizard summoned a familiar - a python that wouldn't stop talking telepathically.

The Balance Blade is a short module contained in "The 13th Skull" adventure booklet. It is written by Joseph Goodman, who has written some of my favorite DCC adventures.

When preparing it, I realized that this thing has some issues:

1. It has a save-or-die trap. I thought about it and figured that a character hit by it could burn luck to avoid dying (you can permanently lower your luck score to give yourself a bonus to a roll. So if the PC fails by 5, they can erase 5 points - permanently - from their luck and succeed).

2. The climax of this adventure pits the group's wizard against the party. The wizard picks up the Balance Blade and is forced to do battle with his or her allies. And when it's over, if the wizard isn't dead, the patron sucks the wizard into a vortex that they don't survive.

The adventure says that this scenario is better for a "one-shot". Nuts to that. I rolled up my sleeves and came up with some adjustments. The most popular NPC in this campaign is a wizard's familiar - the miniature woman of extraordinary beauty. I decided that she would be the one to turn against the party (under magical compulsion by the sinister wizard Sezrekan, her master's patron).

I'd have her fight them, and then if they subdued her, Sezrekan would open the vortex and I'd give the PCs a chance to stop her from falling in. If she did fall in, then the next session could be about going on a quest to save her from Sezrekan's clutches!
 

So, Sezrekan sent his wizard and the other heroes into a cave on a world with a red sky with strange constellations, and in they went.

The Obelisk: There was this crystal monolith with 5 sigils on it. The heroes had no way of knowing that the sigils would disappear as they completed each of the different rooms. It was more of an area to get them to poke and prod. They did do their fair share of poking and prodding.

The Chaos Changeling: They fought a crocodile with stork legs. Each round, its' body changed. I rolled on a chart. By the time they killed it, it had a bear body and a scorpion tail. Awesome monster! Very DCC.

The Gates: There were three gates that needed to be passed through. They had iron bars set close together, close enough that even a halfling could not squeeze through. This was another "poke and prod" scenario. The bars were seemingly impervious to harm. My group was stumped and backtracked, but with a little hinting via the miniature woman of extraordinary beauty, they came back to the gates and eventually realized that each gate's bars could be bent only by a PC of a certain alignment.

In the beginning of this adventure, the DM is warned that the party would need PCs of each of the three different alignments. This group does, so it wasn't an issue.

Trapped Glyphs: There's  pair of trapped glyphs under floor dirt in two hallways between the gates. One sends you a million years into the past (for good!) and the other.. kills you. DC 13 FORT save. This was the one I was worried about.

Two PCs stepped on the glyph of annihilation. They both rolled extremely low on their saving throws. The cleric burned Luck to live. But the other guy, a warrior, didn't have enough luck! He was short by one point! He died.
 

The Succubus: The heroes pass through an illusory wall and are transported to a room with no exits. There is a bed in here and some people. What the PCs see depends on their alignment:

Lawful PCs would see a beautiful lady.
Neutral PCs would see a beautiful lady and her 10 ear old son.
Chaotic PCs would see a succubus and her hideous spider-child.

She said she was trapped here, and could only be freed by the kiss of a "true man". A hero boldly stepped forward to free the nice young lady. She kissed him, and began draining the life out of him (she permanently drew d3 Personality from him per round).

A fight broke out. She used the darkness spell, which is crazy-effective in this game. When you are blind, you have -8 to hit! And because most PCs are human, nobody has infravision!

Worse, even though they were blind, the PCs still would try to fire into melee. The heroes were kicking each others' asses accidentally over and over.

Eventually, they defeated her. Her darkness went away, and her cool effect kicked in: She became oily liquid, which swirled down a non-existent drain, and formed a gaping bottomless pit.

Was the pit really bottomless? Our heroes weren't sure. I swear to you, one PC came incredibly close to jumping in to find out. He probably read my face and thought the better of it. Are you really going to jump into a pit to test if it is bottomless? Crazy.

They eventually climbed down and found a tunnel in the side. The tunnel led to an epic room: A vast hall containing a colossal mummy sitting on an enormous throne. The mummy was as big as you are to a bee.

This would be the one spot in the adventure where we almost had a let-down. The heroes were expecting it to come to life! That would, indeed, be awesome. But it doesn't. It's just a flavor thing. I could have had it come to life and attack, but how the heck would the heroes survive?

When preparing the adventure, I decided to leave the mummy as-is, figuring that the final battle would erase any memories of the mummy.

The Balance Blade: There's a door in the base of the throne that leads to a room - the blade is balanced on the tip of a stone triangle. My heroes were worried about the mummy... so they sent in three "throwaway" characters to get the blade!

The hallway was long. This means that the traitor familiar would have plenty of time to hack in the split party before help could arrive.
 

They came upon the blade. They did nothing as the miniature woman approached the blade, suddenly grew to the height of a normal woman and grabbed it! Then they saw Sezrekan's visage hovering over her, controlling her, and he of course explained to them how he'd tricked them. He wanted the blade, you see, for purposes pertaining to chaos! (Serious)

I proceeded to roll really, really bad. In the end, she and the blade fell into the vortex.

The wizard who owned her was furious, and is hell-bent on getting her back. That means next week our heroes are going to go up against one of their patrons! I am already plotting it, using material from the DCC book entry on Sezrekan as well as the Sezrekan stuff from the adventure "Tower of the Black Pearl".

Overall, it was a good session. The Balance Blade is a nice short adventure, but you definitely need to know your players before running it. You'll almost certainly need to modify it to suit your style. But hey, you're a DM. Customizing it to fit your game isn't too difficult at all.

Tyranny of Dragons - Things to Know About The D&D Adventurer's League

In a few weeks, the new D&D Encounters season starts. I got my hands on the DM packet as well as the adventure, so I figured it might be useful to go over the basics.

For those just getting into the game, D&D Encounters is a program where you go to a game store (on a Wednesday - our store runs Encounters on Wednesdays at 6 PM). You go there to play and a DM like me lets you pick a folder full of stuff. I'll hand you a pre-made character if you don't have one with you. If you don't have a DCI card, I'll give one to you. This is to track your participation through the online reporting tool. DCI cards are also used for Magic: The Gathering games.

We are now part of the Adventurer's League. It is broken down into three programs:

D&D Encounters: Where we play the first section of a published adventure over the course of a few months. Once the season ends, we can either continue the adventure or jump into the new season. Or we could do some expeditions.

D&D Expeditions: These are short stand-alone adventures. Check out the list here. I will definitely try to run Jobe Bittman's adventure at some point. He wrote the DCC RPG adventure The One Who Watches From Below, which was fantastic.

D&D Epics: From what I can tell, these are convention-only super-adventures.

The free player's guide is here.

If you are making a character in advance instead of using a pre-made character, you can choose from either of these options when making stats:

- Standard set (15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8)

- Customizing ability scores variant (Player’s Handbook chapter 1)
After assigning ability scores, apply your racial benefits to derive your starting ability score at 1st level. You cannot roll your ability scores.

You'll need to pick a faction. You will be given a folder full of stuff about your faction. This folder can also be used to hold your magic items certificates. Yep, when you get a magic item in the game, you will be handed a certificate for it. Don't lose it!

Factions:

The Harpers: They covertly oppose the abuse of power
The Order of the Gauntlet: Vigilant seekers of justice
The Emerald Enclave: Wilderness people
The Lords' Alliance: Political coalition concerned with security and prosperity
The Zhentarim: An unscrupulous shadow network

Fun Facts About The Adventurer's League:  

- You cannot play an evil character.
- You can play an adventure more than once, but you have to use a different character each time.
- You can trade magic items with other players, but you both must have certificates and the items must be of the same rarity. Only items with a "trade log" on them can be traded.
- Arms and armor looted off of slain monsters cannot be sold (the items can be used for that session only, though).
- Players can earn 0 to 2 renown points for their standing in their faction each session.
- There are rules to pay for spells! You can get a 1st level cure wounds spell cast on you for 10 gp. I am really liking this.

- A "first tier" character (aka characters level 1-4) can be raised from the dead for free by their faction. But on exchange, the character forfeits all XP and rewards from that session (even those earned prior to death).

The basic story of this season is that a cult seeks to free Tiamat from her prison in the Nine Hells.

I'm not going to harp on this too much, but Tiamat was killed by my heroes (well, technically they used the arrow of fate to combine Bahamut and Tiamat into the dragon god known as Io to fulfill a character's epic destiny) at the end of the 4th edition Scales of War campaign. And she was not based in hell. I understand that there is no set continuity for the game, and that the Realms has a bit of an altered cosmology. I think in my home game I'm going to have to have the heroes split Io with that primordial's axe to re-form Tiamat and Bahamut just so my game can roll along with the current D&D storylines.

What is kind of cool is if you go and check out the Planescape adventure Fires of Dis, you can actually explore Tiamat's lair in hell (which made me really angry).

There are rules for distributing magic items. Either the group comes to an agreement as to who gets it, or if there are multiple suitors, the PC with the least amount of permanent magic items gets it. If it's a tie, the DM rolls randomly to see who gets it.

Cheating! I am going to just post the whole cheating entry right here in an image. The text advises me to try not to embarrass the cheater. Cocked dice are the main culprit in my sessions, along with the old "I roll when the DM isn't looking - if it is bad I pick it up and roll again when the DM is looking" routine.

There's a whole section on appropriate behavior! You officially can not do a table flip! And wow, I've never run across this: Taking an inappropriate photo of other participants. Creepy! And how do you like this... don't take other people's dice without permission!

The punishments for different behaviors are outlined.

Disruptive Behavior: First, you get a warning. On a second warning, I notify the organizer (in my store, I am the organizer and DM, as far as I know). Get a load of this! If the DM is disruptive, alert the organizer. Wow.

Unsafe Behavior: One warning, then you are gone, you jerk.

Theft and Aggressive Behavior: You are ejected, buddy. You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here.

Let's take a look at the stuff in my DM folder.

- A table tent that succinctly describes each faction (this is pictured above, where I describe each faction). I've never been that big on factions, though the Neverwinter 4e season did it very well.

- A special certificate that lets me, the DM, get special starting items when I play. I could get 300 gold, or armor, or a bag of holding, or gloves of swimming and climbing. There's a section on page 12 of the .pdf about DM Rewards. Apparently I earn experience points for a character when I run a game! You know what I am going to do? I am going to make a character and never use him in a game and see how high I can get him! Heck, he can already start with a bag of holding, right? Maybe

I'll make up his adventures each week when I write my session report. Maybe I'll have each player make up an encounter for him at the session and I'll make some roll to see how he did. Heck, if any of you readers have any ideas of grueling or comical encounters for this poor sap to go through, let me know. Hmm I think I will base this character on one of the drawings Tony DiTerlizzi did that he posted on twitter recently. More on this soon.

You know me. I hate being a player. I run these public games for two reasons: To meet new players for my home games, and for swag. This is not swag to me. I want dice, minis, poster maps and printed adventures as rewards. I don't want 300 gold!

A real-life gold piece.. now that would be awesome. Stamped with a D&D logo. Somebody do that!
 

- Tear of Bahamut: I had a hard time taking a good picture of this. Maybe I'm being too dainty, but I don't want to take this out of its' sealed package until the season starts. This is a magic item that can bring a dead person back to life. The most interesting thing here is that it can only be used in a 3 month real-life time period.

It looks like this is given out near the end of this season but can only be used in the next one. That is a fascinating way to try to lock players in, to get them to keep coming back.

- Large stack of magic item certificates: There's all sorts of stuff, including the mighty bag of holding! All that space on the cards and they can't put the description on it? On the back is the trade log. Apparently it can only be traded once or twice.

I am wondering what we do with these when an item is expended? There's a few potions in this pile. Once they are quaffed, do I.. tear up the certificate? Write "void" on it? I feel funny wrecking these things. They could be useful in the future. Maybe they should be destroyed to prevent some cad from snatching them and re-using them illegally. Maybe I should buy a funny rubber stamp or something. Maybe I should burn them!

I was originally going to go over the actual adventure, but it seems smart to save that for a separate column. You're probably semi-conscious at this point as it is. See you later!