Some Character Sketches - Illustrated

I'm very proud of this one. This is my daughter, Arrow's, character sketch of Mazenta, the pseudodragon . She painstakingly drew it using the illustration from the Monster Manual as a reference. Pretty awesome for age 8. Mazenta was a surprizingly helpful addition to the party since she could fly ahead and scout targets invisibly and duck out of every fight, so there was no chance she'd get killed. Few DM's are cruel enough to kill the character of an 8-year old and it's doubly inadvisable if that 8 year old is your child.

Here we have Jess Solith, as illustrated by Emily. A tidy little sketch of the party's serial killer rogue. Jess is an elf raised by the cult of Zehir; not shown are her snake tatts. I'm quite fond of Emily's character sketches as I feel more comfortable with location drawings and I'm hoping she can contribute some more pictures of the group in some of their exciting encounters (hint); stay tuned.
Another fun sketch of Jess. Note the filth fever the character is suffering from after someone suggested that goblins might hide their treasure under a midden heap. Good times!

Encounters in the Keep, illustrated

Here's the first room of the infamous gauntlets of traps. For this encounter I made the rookie mistake of putting five trapped rooms in a row, as an exercise in how 4th ed traps work. It was fun for the first room, painful by the third room, and by the last room pretty much everybody including me just wanted it to end. Traps are fun, but they are best used as one element of a room encounter. I think Emily (the rogue) had a good time, but everyone else was bored and frustrated. Lesson learned.
The remains of the smithy held the restless souls of prisoners burned alive. I couldn't find a monster that fitted the feel I wanted so I took the stat block for ghosts and substituted fire resistance and fire damage for their regular necrotic. It worked pretty well. The insubstantial nature of the monsters made them pretty challenging, even for such a large group (6 players).
Cutaway interior of Guard Captain's tower. I'm kindof fond of this one, reminds me of my grade 9 art class where they taught us perspective. It made a handy reference for the players once a multi-story fight broke out.

Inside the Keep, illustrated

Here's the first inside view of the goblin encampment.


Here's the end of the street, note the goblin encampment at the far end.


A little further inside the keep and we come to the guild factor; the building wasn't in the best shape and also had some nasty surprises.

Kallos Keep exterior, illustrated

For the first leg of the adventure our heroes braved the ruins of Kallos Keep, once a proud outpost of the Akresh Empire, now fallen into the hands of monstrous humanoids.

Here is the first view the group had of the keep.