After reading through all the books I was still excited, but I needed a chance to play it first before planning a game. Then PAX came around, and as a spur of the moment kind of thing I decided to go and invited Sunny to come with me. I knew there would be some D&Ders up there and relished the chance to roll some dice with random strangers. I packed up my PHB and headed up the Seattle. It turned out to be a really great time and I didn't expect the huge presence of WotC there. They practically had a whole building devoted to 4th edition tournaments and dungeon crawls. Luckily I convinced Sunny to try out an impromptu dungeon crawl, and after a couple of encounters I was convinced that I wanted to bring it to the rest of the group.
Next I needed a prefab module. I wasn't going to try to write my own this time around. I was still running a 3.5 edition game that was my own design and it was already more work than I expected. The question was, what module to run? The DMG had a very short series of encounters ready to go, but I kind of wanted something meatier so I'd have to flesh it out with my own stuff, and again I wanted something pure. Next I considered WotC's premier module "Keep on the Shadowfell", but it seemed too meaty and promised to lead into a full campaign, and didn't seem different enough from the campaign I was already running. Dungeon magazine had a few short modules, but not enough of them were 1st level, and I definitely wanted to start fresh since the last game I let people start with prerolled 3rd level PCs. Then I saw that Goodman Games had already published some 4E compliant modules in their Dungeon Crawl Classics line. This seemed to fit nicely, a short and sweet prefab dungeon adventure would be a great way to try out 4E. All I had to do was pick one.
I had three choices it turned out: one set in a city which promised roof-top to sewer combat, one set in a mountain labyrinth, and another focused on sea exploration. I happened to be re-reading the Thieves World series of books by Robert Lynn Asprin et. al. so the corrupt city setting immediately appealed to me. I took a chance and bought the "Sellswords of Punjar", a dungeon crawl classic for 1st-3rd level PCs.
After reading through the module I was confident that this would work as a small scale trial game, I just needed to recruit some players. I schmoozed at parties, sent out emails, had power-lunches and I built a smaller party out of the 3.5 group. All I had to do now was pick a date most people could make. I wasn't able to get everyone there. This time it would be Sunny, Kat, Chris, and Heidi. Austin was very interested but not able to make it to the first session. The game was designed for five players, but I felt like I could make it work with four if we made sure to get the right character balance.
I had just listened to a podcast on the Gamemaster Show that recommended group character creation over individual character generation. Since I was the only one who had the books and had read the rules I figured it would make sense to do everyone at the same time. I got people initial feedback on the kind of race/class combo they wanted to try, but I held off setting roles until the first session. In hindsight I should have had people do more preparation but I'll get into this later.
I had about a week to get prepared for the first game. I read the module a couple of times, downloaded rule updates from WotC (they'd put out two erratas since the initial release) and marked up my books, purchased a new DM-screen, made blank character sheets, looked at example characters and even rolled up a couple of my own to get the hang of it. The module required special handouts and roof tiles so I ran to the copy store, made copies of the handouts and roof tiles, cut them out, and taped the tiles to the battle map. I even separated the module pages and put them in a binder for easy flipping and organizing. I felt the most prepared for this game session than any of my own design. All I had to do was wait for Saturday to roll around.
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