The Gathering

WARNING – Spoilers of Death’s Reach lie below. Since the objective of the blog is to document this adventure and the trilogy, there is no way to avoid those

When I proposed DMing Death’s Reach to my group, I gave them complete liberty to decide their character’s background. I tried a lot to say yes and in the end it wasn’t that difficult.

This lead to the group being composed of two sovereigns, the lover of a Fey Queen, an exiled Deva who lived for 700 years alone in a desert, a wandering Drow whose life was always marked by strife and finally a Genasi who is a Professor at the White Lotus Academy and seeks to unravel the mysteries of the Far Realm.

Very cool backgrounds, but they were not a group. Thus, I couldn’t use the first encounter of Death’s Reach as written, and had to come up with a way of uniting the gang. Let’s see how I chose to do so:

Hello world!

So… I finally decided that a blog would be a good place to put observations about my experience as a DM using more than 140 characters.

I live in Brazil and am currently DMing Death’s Reach, the first part of the Epic Level trilogy written by Bruce Cordell and Chris Sims. It has a very interesting plot, that spills over to Kingdom of the Ghouls (E2 adventure) and Prince of Undeath (E3, yet unpublished).

The PCs were created using the character creation rules for characters above 1st level (alas, not organically grown from ground up). I allowed use of every published material, so here is our crew roster (listed in no particular order but that of my memory) along with their respective race, class, paragon path and epic destiny:

• Theron Moonscale – Dragonborn Fighter, Polearm Master, Undying Warrior
• Tari Lothmor – Elf Cleric, Divine Oracle, Demigod
• Osiris Tvastar – Deva Invoker, Angelic Aspect, Exalted Angel
• Isengrim Naïlo aep Rylint’tar – Drow Warlock (dual pact: Fey and Dark), Feytouched, Demigod
• Drisdhaun – Drow Rogue, Daggermaster, Punisher of the Gods
• Eranah Zan-kyri – Earthsoul Genasi Hybrid Swordmage/Wizard, War Wizard of Cormyr, Radiant One

I will dedicate a post to each of them later on, especially to Eranah, since he is a hybrid and I feel that system needs a lot of feedback. There will also be a post dedicated to each game session. We have currently played three, so some details of those will be a bit sketchy, relying on my log of each session (my notes).

One of my motivations in doing this is that I feel the Epic Tier is a bit of an unexplored territory. Some things that work on Heroic and Paragon simply don’t make much sense on epic (to my experience, at least) and I think there should be active discussion about that.

This is all for the moment. See you all next time!