{"id":115,"date":"2008-06-01T12:26:27","date_gmt":"2008-06-01T10:26:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/isabout.wordpress.com\/?p=115"},"modified":"2020-01-02T20:25:32","modified_gmt":"2020-01-02T20:25:32","slug":"24-hours-on-the-shadowfell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.arkenstonepublishing.net\/isabout\/2008\/06\/01\/24-hours-on-the-shadowfell\/","title":{"rendered":"24 hours on the Shadowfell"},"content":{"rendered":"

Busy, busy, with well-paying whitecollar-slaving. Only now time to report on the weekend a week ago, when I was at Jycon<\/a>. It’s a new boardgame convention in central Finland – very good all-around arrangements, I have the utmost faith that it’ll do well in the future if the organizing association becomes well established.<\/p>\n

I only played two games at the convention. One was a Diplomacy Finnish Championships trial wherein I secured my own entrance to the championship finals later in the year; the (shortish) game is being analyzed at the boards<\/a> right now. The other was around 24 hours of Dungeons & Dragons<\/em>, split over three days. The adventure was Keep on the Shadowfell<\/a>, the introductory adventure of the new 4th edition of D&D. As the adventure is still pretty fresh and the actual game hasn’t come out, I thought that somebody might be interested in my impressions.<\/p>\n

The GM was my brother Markku, who has decades of experience with D&D – as I understand it, he started with the first edition of AD&D sometime during the ’80s. This decade Markku has played extensive campaigns of third edition, ranging from participating in my own experiments to the hardcore grind of the World’s Largest Dungeon. Markku is very excited about the new edition of the game, so it wasn’t difficult to arrange for us to meet midway in Jyv\u00e4skyl\u00e4 for a weekend of gaming with some mutual friends and associates.<\/p>\n

The Shadowfell experience<\/h3>\n

Most likely the reader is already aware of the gist of the adventure (and if you don’t want to be, I certainly don’t recommend reading an actual play report on it!), so just a short recap: the adventurers journey to the town of Winterhaven on some pretense, only to get entangled in a plot to loose the dark, undeady powers of Orcus to the world. Sounds good to me: classic fantasy tropes and heroic action.<\/p>\n

We had specifically agreed beforehand that the group would play serious D&D, staying faithful to whatever the vision of the designers might be. This proved a challenge to myself and the others with less recent and less… hardcore D&D experience. Dungeons & Dragons is some wacky, idiosyncratic shit! I’m first in the line when it comes to lauding challengeful adventure gaming with little character focus and lots of situation-based maneuvering, but this was old-style D&D with no holds barred: kobold attacks wave after wave, utterly relentless and unmotivated, slaughter and looting, trips to town to convert to gold, rinse and repeat: hack ‘n slash gaming, in other words.<\/p>\n

Now, while I have some several years of experience with sorts of D&D myself, and I’d even lay claim to some expertise when it comes to “adventure gaming” in the larger context, hack ‘n slash is something I’ve only ever done on the computer. I am not kidding<\/em> when I say that I and numerous other Finnish roleplayers (perhaps others as well, I don’t know) really, truly never grew into roleplaying through the hack ‘n slash format. My earliest roleplaying was challenge-based like D&D is, that’s true, but it was also strongly setting-based and situational: I have never, truly spent any considerable time playing a game where you’re supposed to collect experience points and treasure as a matter of meta-game efficiency instead of in-game, character-based motivation. My first experiences with D&D were with AD&D 2nd edition sometime during the mid-nineties, at which point I found the game quite antiquated and clumsy compared to the much more sophisticated Runequest, say. If the 3rd edition of the game didn’t take such a radical break as it did, I doubt that I’d have familiarized myself further with it to this day.<\/p>\n

As the reader might imagine, our group, which was split half and half along these lines, faced some considerable friction and negotiation over how we were going to play in the first place. My side of the party was simply flabbergasted: we were here to look for cultists, and now we’d need to go hunt kobolds for some two-penny noble instead? What for? Experience? What’s that, my character would like to know? What – we really are directing our characters on meta-game basis here? They’ll die horribly if they go directly after the cultists? And there’s gold and treasures too, with the kobolds? But my character is a honorable mercenary, and he already took that quest from the temple to investigate this cult thing! Speaking of which, that asshole lord Beam (the Finnish nickname Lord Padraig soon gained from us for his boorish attitude, “lordi Parru”) is clearly either co-conspirator or a witless tool of the cultists!<\/p>\n

If we were younger and less experienced as roleplayers, I’d say that we’d have suffered complete meltdown pretty soon in the adventure, with my character getting thrown in jail, another going to suicide-by-kobold horde and the rest quitting in disgust over such in-game essentials as cost of door-replacement and the devil-may-care attitude of this so-called lord of Winterhaven. Luckily, we’re all old hands at negotiating play, so we just talked about it long enough to hassle out what we were doing there: this would not be free roleplaying as we’re used to, this would not involve characters negotiating their own goals, the GM would not allow stupid mistakes or innovative tactics on the part of the party: our participation in the on-going structure of the game would be facilitative only, with the GM framing each combat encounter in sequence. Our characters would go on to gleefully tackle each challenge, no matter how weird in the setting context.<\/p>\n

After we figured out the constraints, play certainly got by quicker. There were still lots of negotiation over how and what we were allowed to do, but as the GM diligently bashed at us, we learned to be less and less “smart” in the conventional sense and more and more D&D-savvy: we would move around with characters attached from the hip, would not question quest-givers, would not set a forest-fire to smoke out the kobolds, would walk gleefully into traps and steal everything not bolted down. Everything certainly felt much smoother as we went along, but it was also conciderably duller to play – at the end the GM just decided to skip ahead in the dungeon into the high point encounters instead of worrying about the, frankly, pretty pointless pacing fights in-between. This enabled us to “finish” the keep in pretty exactly 24 hours of play, dying gloriously in a final fight against the evil Krakoa, the Living Island (or something like that, D&D naming convention is bland enough to make it impossible to remember this stuff).<\/p>\n

High points<\/h3>\n

The whole experience is too extensive to detail here, but I have some high (or low, depending on your viewpoint) points to share:<\/p>\n