I got some great news today: my primary web hosting service, MyDomain.com, now offers unlimited bandwidth (traffic) on the hosting plan I use. I don’t know how long this has been true; I just learned about it today. I will immediately start migrating Icosahedrophilia podcast files back over to MyDomain.com, so that everything will be served from one place, and I can cut back a little on hosting expenses. Yippee!

Well, adventure fans, this past week has been pretty busy in my real life, so it took my longer than I’d hoped to present you with episode 52 of the Icosahedrophilia podcast. But now we can cheerfully invite you to listen in on “City of the Pirate Kings, Part 4″! Please listen now or subscribe via iTunes. This episode features the following segments:

• Weighing Anchor: Ed Katayama, owner of A Hidden Fortress in Simi Valley (my friendly local game store), introduces the episode.
• The Staging Area: I briefly recap the events of “City of the Pirate Kings,” part 3. For a full campaign recap, listen to the Staging Area for episode 49. I also remind you where to hear the PCs’ first run-in with Urlglar the Vicious.
• The Weather Report: The crew of the Broken Promise spend an afternoon in Scalabar chatting up the locals for information about Sharkey, Kruncha, Urlglar, and more. The PCs finally decide that their best course of action is to raid Urlglar’s ship.
• The Prop Shop: I briefly describe my use of the GameMastery Map Pack: Waterfront to stage part of the afternoon in Scalabar, and go into some detail about my use of an unannounced skill challenge as a framework for the PCs’ day. I give more details about this in the extended show notes; you’ll need the audio discussion and the written material in the extended show notes to get the fullest understanding possible of how this challenge integrated with the storyline. I also promote the Tome Show—especially episode 127, on which I’ll join host Jeff Greiner and others for a group review of Underdark—and Radio Free Hommlet.

I hope that you enjoy “City of the Pirate Kings, Part 4,” and that you’ll return for the conclusion cliffhanger in “City of the Pirate Kings, Part 5″!

I have more to say about this …

During the week of January 31–February 6, 2010, I reviewed the following products for DriveThruRPG:

• Power Pics Villains 7 – Malign Shapeshifter by Mesozoic Press. If you use printable miniatures for Mutants & Masterminds or another superhero RPG, and you need to represent a villain similar to Clayface or Sandman, this guy will do the job for you. (Read more at DriveThruRPG.) ★★
• Tendril’s Oak Inn by Encompass. Even if you already own some other miniatures-scale tavern map, as I do, you still might find Tendril’s Oak Inn to be a good purchase if, like me, you don’t want every inn or tavern your PCs visit to look the same. (Read more at DriveThruRPG.) ★★★★
• Volondor: The City by Stainless Steel Dragon. If you’re thinking about buying this product, take the product description’s advice and look carefully at the preview before purchasing. Unfortunately for a product marketed as a map set, the first thing a new purchaser is likely to notice about this product is how unattractive the maps actually are. (Read more at DriveThruRPG.) ★
• Zero Hour Fantasy Cartography: Sailing Ships by Ki Ryn Studios. As a DM running a campaign based on a sailing ship, I was very excited to receive a review copy of these printable miniatures-scale sailing ship maps. (Read more at DriveThruRPG.) ★★★★

I have recently gotten started once again painting metal miniatures. My most recent project was D’khul, Illithid Bathalian Sorcerer:

Before late 2009, I hadn’t painted a metal miniature in over 20 years, and I wasn’t good at it then—so I’m really learning how to paint minis for the first time. I’m certainly no expert. D’khul was my first real attempt at decent highlighting. The results don’t strike me as very smooth, but I’m not displeased with the result:

After consulting the peanut gallery, I finally decided on a sort of ochre-tan color for the flayer’s long loincloth, thinking of it as the hide of some unfortunate Underdark-dwelling mammal.

My next project will be a flayer pirate:

We’re back, adventure fans, to present you with episode 51 of the Icosahedrophilia podcast, in which you can follow heroes old and new through part 3 of our adventure entitled “City of the Pirate Kings.” Please listen now or subscribe via iTunes. This episode features the following segments:

• Weighing Anchor: Aeryn Rudel of Blackdirge Publishing and Goodman Games introduces this episode.
• The Staging Area: I briefly recap the events of “City of the Pirate Kings,” part 2. For a full campaign recap, listen to the Staging Area for episode 49.
• The Weather Report: Our heroes spend a night in the Scalabar jail, and find themselves unexpectedly cut loose with a minimum of judicial red tape when an unexpected murder comes to light. The PCs’ own investigation leads them out of the city to a meeting with His Excellency Kap’n Kruncha, the Pirate-King King, and eventually back to the Perfect Storm.
• The Prop Shop: I explain the small debt this adventure owes to the very first D&D novel ever written, briefly describe the battlemaps I prepared for this segment just in case the PCs tried to fight the kroola on the kroola’s home turf, and remind you where to listen to the PCs’ first run-in with an NPC who looms large in this adventure, Urlglar the Vicious.

I hope that you enjoy “City of the Pirate Kings, Part 3,” and that you’ll plan to sail with us again when we present “City of the Pirate Kings, Part 4″!

I have more to say about this …

Looks like we made it, adventure fans! The Icosahedrophilia podcast has hit the half-century mark! I As far as I know, Icosahedrophilia is now the longest-running podcast presenting actual play of a continuous 4e D&D campaign, and we’ve got plenty more gaming goodness to present to you in the months to come. This milestone episode presents “City of the Pirate Kings, Part 2.” Please listen now or subscribe via iTunes. This episode features the following segments:

• Weighing Anchor: Chris Tulach of the RPGA introduces this episode.
• The Staging Area: I briefly recap the events of “City of the Pirate Kings,” part 1. For a full campaign recap, listen to the Staging Area for episode 49.
• The Weather Report: The barroom brawl continues, with our heroes contributing to the mayhem at various levels, some just watching from the sidelines. A night in jail rounds out the episode. Note: This episode does have some allusions to “adult” activities taking place within the tavern, though these references remain only suggestive and do not get profane or pornographic.
• The Prop Shop: I briefly credit the pirate name generator at piratemerch.com for its role in helping me come up with names for the barflies involved in the fight, though several others exist. I describe my use of SkeletonKey Games’ e-Adventure Tiles Weekly #1 to create the Scalabar jail layout (see the map in the extended show notes), and I credit DM extraordinaire Chris Perkins with the name “Scalabar,” which I stole adapted from his adventure “The Scourge of Scalabar” in Dungeon #74. I also briefly promote episode 125 of the Tome Show, which will present the Tome’s annual “third party extravaganza” in which I and others join host Jeff Greiner to review non-WotC products useful for playing D&D.

I hope that you enjoy “City of the Pirate Kings, Part 2,” and that you’ll plan to sail with us again when we present “City of the Pirate Kings, Part 3″!

I have more to say about this …

The ChattyDM tweeted this idea mere moments ago (from my perspective as I type this, of course):

Wanna increase crowd enthusiasm at #dnd table? Give generous damage bonuses to attacks played with proper sound effects, Extra for gestures.

This suggestion reminds me a little of my second-favorite RPG (after D&D, of course, and just ahead of Star Wars Saga Edition, though I play Star Wars more frequently), Mutants & Masterminds. In M&M, GMs award “hero points” that players can use in various ways.

Chatty’s idea got me thinking about how one might implement the suggestion. I wouldn’t necessarily want to limit it to sound effects, and not sure I’d give extra for gestures. But perhaps I should consider giving bonus dice for excellence in role-playing. Maybe combining this with an achievement list (like this one or this one—I don’t claim to be original) would spice table life up a bit.

Instead of awarding extra XP (which we don’t use anyway; levels are treasure in the Stormhaven campaign) or a permanent boon of some sort, I’m thinking about awarding bonus powers. I would print double-sided power cards and hand them out as rewards for great role-playing and/or for reaching predefined achievements, or for doing something unexpectedly cool. Here are the two powers that would appear on the cards (first draft):

Another possibility would be a static bonus of +5 per tier; using d6s lowers the average a bit. What do you think of this implementation—especially if you play in the Stormhaven campaign?

During the week of January 24–30, I reviewed the following products for DriveThruRPG:

• Blackdirge’s Bargain Templates: Templar by Aeryn Rudel. If you want to quickly add a dash of paladin-like flavor to a 4e humanoid creature without actually making the creature a paladin NPC, I can think of no better way than to apply this templar template … (Read more at DriveThruRPG.) ★★★★★
• The Dungeon Alphabet by Michael Carter, published by Goodman Games. This is such a clever product: old school in style and sensibility, yet universally applicable; funny and entertaining, yet actually useful; lighthearted, yet richly detailed. (Read more at DriveThruRPG.) ★★★★★
• Kaiju Rising by Stratos of Baily Records. This track gradually moves from a airy beginning to slow drums with mysterious (and repetitive) electronic tones, and then erupts into the driving, percussive core of the track … (Read more at DriveThruRPG.) ★★★
• Scenes of Space Hex Battle Maps by Jon Brazer Enterprises. Despite the gorgeous artwork and low cost, this product disappointed me somewhat … (Read more at DriveThruRPG.) ★★
• Story Maps: Battlemat Terrain, Scaling the Undead Dragon by Alida Saxon for Savage Mojo. Although the artwork in these twelve tiles (repeated twice in the product, one with a square grid and once with a hex grid) does a rather good job of depicting a dragon’s scales, I have a hard time envisioning a dragon’s back as the site for an extended battle. (Read more at DriveThruRPG.) ★★★

This list doesn’t include the soundscapes I reviewed in the latest installment of Dungeons & DJs.

Sling him in the longboat ’til he’s sober, of course. Oh, wait. That’s somebody else.

Like many other D&D gaming groups, my group occasionally encounters scheduling issues. By “occasionally,” I mean “just about every stinkin’ week.” My players and I mostly occupy the “married, with children” and “gainfully employed” demographics, which limits us to one session per month anyway. Add the unique issues present in every job and/or family, and more often than not, we have one or more absent players.

Midway through January, I posted about our use of “stunt doubles,” or players who can’t commit to on ongoing campaign but want to play once in a while. These players are invited to show up when they can. If we have an absent regular, the “stunt double” can take over that character. If all regular players are present, the “stunt double” can run monsters during combat.

We’ve tried other solutions, too, with greater or lesser success.

One of the reasons I wanted to set the current campaign aboard a sailing ship was so that we could plausibly explain the absence of a character whose player was absent. Inspired by Star Trek, I figured that an absent player’s character could be tied up with various duties on board the ship, or might be seasick, or might have some other reason for staying behind. We used this technique to good effect with Alanso Heslock when David couldn’t attend one of our sessions. I even worked with David outside the gaming sessions to create a side story about what Alanso did while the others were galavanting about the island killing goblin(oid)s. Of course, you can accomplish the same thing if your PCs have a “home base” anywhere; the ship just allows the “home base” to move around a lot. This technique breaks down, however, when you have long overland journeys. My PCs have been off their boat now for something like six sessions now, and leaving a character “offstage” for a weeklong trek through the desert doesn’t work when s/he suddenly shows up in an unexpected place.

In a recently-uploaded story arc on the Icosahedrophilia podcast, Steve was not present to play Dra’kith, but the PCs were in the middle of exploring a large underground city. I could think of no plausible way to get Dra’kith back to the ship alone, so I ran him as an NPC for that session (in which he died—bwahahahahahaha!—not because I’m mean, but to make way for Steve’s new character, a warforged barbarian). Recently, Matt K., who plays Jacques (a human paladin) in the campaign, could not attend, so Jay (who has played D&D with Matt for many years) ran Jacques; on the same night, I ran Kitaru (Jeff’s dragonborn sorcerer) as an NPC (and got him killed—again, not because I’m mean, but because Jeff is moving to another state).

Having one player run two characters and/or having the DM run a PC as an NPC allied with the party works reasonably well for a night, but it can really slow things down if the pinch-hitting player or DM does not have a thorough knowledge of the character’s powers, feats, skills, and combat role. Therefore, I’m considering a slight change to this strategy. Before our next session, I may try to write up stat blocks for each PC in NPC or “companion character” (Dungeon Master’s Guide 2, pp. 27–33) style. I would do this in consultation with the players so that each PC’s stat block reflected his or her “signature style,” but gave a pinch-hitting player—or me—fewer choices to sort through during a fight. If I implement this idea, we would have three options for how each player character is portrayed:

• The PC is portrayed by his/her/its regular controlling player
• The PC is portrayed fully by a “stunt double” sitting in for an absent regular player
• The PC is portrayed by another present player, or by the DM, using an abbreviated companion character/NPC stat block

What do you think about these strategies? Would you find them useful at your table? How do you handle absent players?

Update: See also Sarah Darkmagic’s perspective and suggestions on this topic.