Sorry to hear that man.

I'm just now starting to try my hand at DMing as well. But currently sticking to play-by-post as its slower, easier to stay organized, and I can look up answers to things without having a table of people waiting on me.

Not doing...too too bad so far. Running two different groups through Keep on the Shadowfell at the same time.

One of these days I swear I'm going to have two groups for different campaigns stumble into each other in the same dungeon. Heh.

I'm currently a new player both to D&D and DMing. We had a group with a DM who runs three groups and he walked us through a basic encounter to get us to Level 2, then his schedule got busy and he couldn't make the trip to our location for at least a few months. I've been the most proactive in everything regarding getting a group together, optimizing characters, and learning basics of the game (I currently play two characters to fill out our team; a cleric and a wizard). We're strictly sticking with PHB1 for simplicity's sake. I want to try and get into DMing so I've been reading through Keep on the Shadowfell and trying to prepare stuff for that when we finally get a chance to play again. I've read (mostly skimmed unless there was something unfamiliar) the DM's Handbook and I have some other basic resources for 4e.

My questions are simple.

Are there any quick resources I can use for DMing? I have the book in PDF format but I was wondering if there's a reference chart for basic issues.

Are there resources available for this campaign? From what I understand it is one of the original official campaigns of 4e, so I assume people have made various resources or guides to help make the adventure more engaging.

What should I do with my two characters? They're the only cleric and wizard in our group so they are pretty essential to the success of our group. I'm pretty sure two of my players wouldn't mind taking up one of each in addition to their own characters, but I don't want them to have to get bogged down with managing two characters. Are there any alternatives to getting these characters in the game if I'm DMing?

Thanks for any help!