New DM with a question.

[Adamus]

I'm planning on running a 4e campaign at the beginning of September and I wanta know if there is a new dm campaign out there somewhere that kind of guides the dm through the process. If there is please let me know where i can download or find one. Thanks alot!

PS> Ive played lots of games as a player so Im familiar with the rules I just want a dm guide to make the process of learning to dm easier and faster.

[Griogre]

You could download H1 Keep on the Shadowfell. That was WotC's first dungeon released prior to the 4E core rules and you can download an updated version on there site for free: https://www.wizards.com/dnd/TryDnD.aspx There is a very short adventure in the back of the 4E DMG too.

There are also some other commercial modules you can buy also. You might find WotC's Dungeon Delve book a good buy because they have lots of short adventures of all different levels. Goodman Games also does some 4E compatible modules and they have several 1st level ones including one for $2 and they do sell their modules in PDF form.

[Adamus]

thanks for the info man its appreciated!

[Stitched]

Should also add that the "Scales of War" campaign is free, if you have a DDI subscription. I believe it's supposed to run from 1st level all the way to 30th (someone can correct me on this) so you would definitely get a taste of the entire game and all the tiers your players can experience.

[Griogre]

Yes, Scales of War is a 1-30 adventure path which you can get out of a DDI subscription. If you are willing to spend some money you can also get the 4E version of the War of the Burning Sky which is an ENWorld 1-30 adventure path and I think someone did/is doing the modules for FG. That might be the best if you are starting out because you can look at what was done for that. If you are short on time not having to input the adventure would be a *huge* time saver and worth the few dollars.

[Zeus]

EugeneZ is the man to talk to for War of the Burning Sky FGII modules. I believe you need to have purchased the PDFs from ENWorld to get access to them but drop EugeneZ a PM for more details.

As for producing Scales of War modules, it maybe easier than you might be thinking. Combined with new 4E Parser functionality that enables the creation of an NPC database, my latest 4E Module Workshop tool (see my Resource site for more details) makes short work of compiling adventure modules. I did SoW #4 on Saturday night, took me 60 mins (end-to-end) to produce a functional module.

[Stitched]

60 mins! :O

My god. It's taken me almost 2 weeks to input everything for KoTS ; granted I am placing tokens on the maps and stocking all the encounters. I must be doing things the hard way.

[Zeus]

No your are doing it right, it just takes ages to manually cut n paste and then format the raw adventure text.

The tool I have written simply fast tracks this process, you select a region of text from your PDF, copy and then click one of several button in the tool or hit one of the hotkeys and the text will *magically* appear in the tools editor window, pre-formatted and ready to be parsed by the 4EParser.

The tool also provides a number of features which help with:

- automatically creating encounters.txt
- automatically compiling required NPCs to support the above encounters (using the new NPC database feature in the 4E Parser to create a database of all my NPCs (across 20 or so source modules like MM, MM2, DMG, MM3, DMD, DCD etc).
- automatically locating and copy the correct tokens and supporting images - you just need to point the app at a folder which contains all your tokens and images. As it applies NPCs it detects ZToken and ZImage flags and copies the appropriate image files.

You still need to prepare your images and tokens - but there are numerous tools/scripts/methods for doing this quickly. All in all the whole process becomes much faster and frees you the DM to focus on the really important stuff, like adapting and tweaking each module to fit your specific campaign.

[Nephilim667]

You could download H1 Keep on the Shadowfell. That was WotC's first dungeon released prior to the 4E core rules and you can download an updated version on there site for free: https://www.wizards.com/dnd/TryDnD.aspx There is a very short adventure in the back of the 4E DMG too.

There are also some other commercial modules you can buy also. You might find WotC's Dungeon Delve book a good buy because they have lots of short adventures of all different levels. Goodman Games also does some 4E compatible modules and they have several 1st level ones including one for $2 and they do sell their modules in PDF form.

You might also have a look at the Dungeonmastering website as they refer to a lot a free adventures.
All of them can be downloaded as PDFs.

[Jundle]

The tool I have written simply fast tracks this process, you select a region of text from your PDF, copy and then click one of several button in the tool or hit one of the hotkeys and the text will *magically* appear in the tools editor window, pre-formatted and ready to be parsed by the 4EParser.

The tool also provides a number of features which help with:

- automatically creating encounters.txt
- automatically compiling required NPCs to support the above encounters (using the new NPC database feature in the 4E Parser to create a database of all my NPCs (across 20 or so source modules like MM, MM2, DMG, MM3, DMD, DCD etc).
- automatically locating and copy the correct tokens and supporting images - you just need to point the app at a folder which contains all your tokens and images. As it applies NPCs it detects ZToken and ZImage flags and copies the appropriate image files.

You still need to prepare your images and tokens - but there are numerous tools/scripts/methods for doing this quickly. All in all the whole process becomes much faster and frees you the DM to focus on the really important stuff, like adapting and tweaking each module to fit your specific campaign.

What is the name of this tool and is it available for download?