DMing starts tonight

So tonight is supposed to be the big night where I first get a shot at killing a bunch of player characters. I'm not that crazed about killing PCs, really, but I don't mind doing it if it happens. I finished up with the input of the needed monsters from the Monster's Manual and pretty much all of the Player's Handbook, so I'm in good shape there. I decided to just add stuff I was interested in to the existing library, at least for now. As time goes on, I will probably resort to splitting out a Supplemental Module that contains both Monsters, Skills, Classes, Races from other sources, but the ones I really like I will incorporate into the Core versions that I have. As it stands now, I can see the Dragon rituals, the Star Pact powers, Warforged, Artificers and the non-named Scales of War monsters making it into my core. If I get ambitious, I'd love to allow playable Dopplegangers, Lycanthropes and some other monsters, but I think those would need some collaboration to get working right.

I've spent the last two nights fighting with Firewalls, trying to make sure that players will actually be able to connect to my campaign. It still didn't work last night, so I'm fairly well concerned about it tonight. It will be an adventure unto itself, no doubt. Hopefully, everyone can show up and get connected long enough to get characters rolled up, and if we're really lucky, maybe we can run a quick battle to make sure I know how these things work.

Up next week (assuming this week works!) - starting entering Siege at Bordrin's Watch into FG and updating the ruleset to 1.1.0 and the new parsers (now with rituals!). Fun fun.

Getting Ready to DM

I've been pretty quiet here for a while now, I'm just not that into recording my thoughts on the various games I've been playing: it takes too much time away from playing them! My biggest thing, game-wise, that I have going on now is getting ready to use Fantasy Grounds II to run a bunch of GWJers through Dungeon Magazine's Scales Of War Adventure Path. I've probably spent 15 hours on adding maps, story blocks, characters, monsters so far, and I'm not even done! I finally had a breakthrough in getting the parsers working, so I can start the painful data entry with tools, instead of trying to hand-do everything. Once I get a good part of the PHB and MM entered, I definitely want to get a bunch of stuff from the magazines entered, too; I just need to decide if I want a third (and fourth) Library, or a beefier set of two - I'm leaning towards two.

My plan is to actually keep some sort of a journal of what I did to DM this here, and update the Wiki with the story parts. It will be a lot of work, but I think it might be really fun, too.