User:Bill/Thunderspire Mountain Enhanced

Pregame

The local Encounters group tapped me to run the Season 5 module, Dark Secret of Evard. I agreed without hesitation, mostly because my efforts to put together a consistent play group have failed for the last two years, but also because I wanted to see how D&D 4 really handles. I've owned a copy of the game for several years, but I've done very little with it due to my general bias against D20 and all things D&D. Honestly, there's nothing wrong with the game; I'm just the sort of person that prefers to avoid popular things.

Anyway, one of the regulars expressed an interest in playing the season at a higher level, Encounters starts at level 1. So I determined to run the game starting at level 5. That presented two immediate challenges. First, I had to generate a set of appropriate characters. One of the strengths of the Encounters program is that anyone, regardless of his or her familiarity with the game can show up totally unprepared and join the game. To preserve that, every element of every character needs to be available for quick and easy reference. Bearing in mind that this season coincided with the release of Heroes of Shadow and the Shadowfell campaign setting, I elected to use HoS characters exclusively for my pregens. Drastically underestimating the time commitment involved in fully detailing each of them, I decided to make one of each class and race option. And, just for my own amusement, I used all of the fey PC races. Ultimately, I completed nine characters with notes for each power, feat, and magic item relevant to them; at approximately five hours per character to complete.

The second challenge would be upgrading the adventure to be suitable for level five characters. Encounters resets to level one every season, so I was anticipating needing to revise the adventure significantly. However, due to an oversight, our Encounters group never ordered the season 5 materials. Undaunted, and because we were two-weeks behind on season 4, I had time to find a substitute. I selected Thunderspire Mountain, an adventure for characters from levels 3-5. I probably could have saved myself some work by choosing a level 5 adventure, but I liked the tone of the book. The process of revising the adventure has been very informative too.

The Characters

Below are some notes on my pregenerated characters, including my decisionmaking process. I'm probably not going to include fully detailed character sheets for them though. I'm too lazy. One overarching observation that I made during the character generation process was how similar in power level these characters were to starting Solar Exalted, from White Wolf's Exalted series. That may be nothing more than me projecting my own desire for these characters to be something greater than casual dungeon delving sociopaths, but I'm far from the first to draw these parallels. My years of experience with Exalted probably shows in the names too.

Auden Grimson

Heroes of Shadow introduces a new Assassin variant, the Executioner. The class is designed around using debilitating poisons to set up the target for a killing strike. In fact it includes a class feature that literally says the character may choose to automatically reduce a creature with ten or fewer hit points to zero without a save. It's a little over the top, but I'm fine with it.

In effort to use every fey race in the game, I elected to make the character a gnome. It turned out to be disgustingly effective. The character is capable of using stealth reflexively and can create a variety of illusions to further mask his presence. Combined with the poison making gimicks, it looks like an enormously fun character for folks that like details and playing a character who is never quite part of the group.