As promised in my post ‘Taking Stock…‘, on New Year’s Eve just gone, I’m starting several monthly columns as a way of challenging myself to achieve a regular, albeit light by the standards of many of the great bloggers out there.

This is the debut of Content Corner, which is to be the outlet for my self-publishing goals. My intention is that this column will always have some solid D&D content that I hope is useful to someone out there e.g. encounters and/or short adventures, skill challenges, new monsters, location write-ups etc.

Objectives include:

• All content will be 4th Edition compatible. Its the system I play and enjoy, and I certainly don’t have the time to broaden my scope 🙂
• Most of the content will be based on my home-brew world Tolrendor, which I am currently developing in  4E  after a long hiatus since 2nd Edition!
• The target is to post this column at least once per month, but if I’ve got more content, I’ll post more often! Heh, we’ll see …
• One of my goals is to learn more about self-publishing, so I’ll be trying out various style and layouts.
• Comments, of course, are more than welcome …

Skill Challenge: Buying a Horse…

This skill challenge originally came about in my kid’s campaign, after they had finished their first dungeon adventure, and had hit the town of Fallcrest – their very first experience of a D&D town. Naturally I wanted this to be a ‘experience’; they had money to spend, and buying horses was top of the list (my daughter’s influence, as I’ve mentioned before…)…

… So rather than just consult the Players Handbook and deduct the cash, I wanted to encourage a role-playing session around finding out the best places to buy horses, and the negotiations themselves. I put this together as a skill challenge so there was a framework for how successful the characters were i.e. I wanted there to be actual game benefits (or penalties) involved. This was achieved by having the level of success in the skill challenge drive the outcome in terms of how well the characters managed to negotiate prices, and the quality of the horses they purchased.

It worked out very well in my campaign, so I’ve written it up for this column:

Skill Challenge – Buying a Horse
Please let me know what you think in the comments, on all aspects e.g. content, layout etc.

Happy Gaming,

TolrendorDM