Mar 16-22

Okay here we are in my second weekly update post. In my first post I mentioned how broad my weekly reading was; apparently I was mistaken. I’ve since added the RPG Blogger’s Network to my Google Reader subscription. To say I was overwhelmed is an understatement. I looked back over the week of posts to see how many there were and it was in the 700s. Now the feed has an odd habit of grabbing the same posts multiple times from the feed and I’m not sure why. But if you want your daily dose of RPG goodness go drink from the fire hose over there. There are so many good blogs and posts every single week. In looking though I discovered that my ideas for a Weekly What’s New was nothing new and that there are a couple of bloggers who do the same thing. Hopefully my opinions on articles will inspire some of you to take a look at some of the wonderful content available. This week I add a couple of sites that were absent from my first round up, Kobold Quarterly and Open Design.

Dragon Magazine #373

Party Building ~ link

The Dungeon Master’s Guide for 4e was the best book of the three by far as it addressed so many good articles to the DM on how the game runs. One of the articles in there was about party composition and how to adapt to deficiencies in party role representation and alternate party structures. Robert J. Schwalb puts that discussion in front of players in a pretty good article on how party role plays into the construction of a party. How to balance small groups or large groups, how the party will play with an abundance or shortage of characters in a role and how to use secondary roles and multiclassing to strengthen a weak area. Overall the article is a little gamey, concentrating on the tactics of D&D 4e, which is one of the game’s strengths but not necessarily how every group plays it (like mine).

Playtest – Martial Power 2 ~ link

Richard Baker, Robert J. Schwalb, and Peter Lee present us with an article on combat styles from the Martial Power 2 book. What jumped out at me right away was how quickly Wizards was taking the series of books to the next level. Sure we have PHB2, DMG2, and MM2 already announced as well as AV2, but now we also see that they are doing the Power series of books in sequence too. The article on combat styles is interesting and presents pairs of feats that make up combat styles. Each style has a specific set of weapons that share characteristics such as all two-handed axes or all high-crit heavy blades, etc. The first of the two feats enhances at-will abilities that work well with the weapons from any martial class and the second feat applies to all attacks with the weapons.

The combat styles included in the article include:

• Black Hood Style – two-handed axes
• Desert Moon Sword Style – high-crit heavy blades
• Leafrunner Style – light ranged weapons
• Moradin’s Forge Style – heavy picks and hammers
• Ninth Legion Style – spears and picks with heavy shields
• Partisan Pole Arm Style – pole arms…
• Reaving Axe Style – one handed axes
• Steel Vanguard Style – two-handed heavy blades

Dungeon Magazine #164

Dungeoncraft ~ link

James Wyatt has been giving us a glimpse into his Greenbriar setting since the first preview articles of 4e. It has been interesting to see how it has evolved and in this episode he reviews how he will be adding Player’s Handbook 2 into his setting. While the discussion is valuable, I’m more interested in the evolving plot with the Speaker in Dreams. There are a few hints in here which keep my interest.

Ruling Skill Challenges – Social Skill Challenges, Part 1 ~ link

Mike Mearls’ series on Skill Challenges have been some of the most valuable pieces in Dungeon. Skill Challenges are a fascinating option in 4e but one of the most difficult to pull off. Many a blog post has been spent on Skill Challenges, all of them extremely valuable. The more we have on this facet of 4e the better. I’ve written a few myself that have failed spectacularly. Following Mike’s advice I converted half a 3.5 adventure from Tales of Zobeck. It looks really good on paper, here’s hoping that it goes well. In this particular article, Mike talks about how to make Social Skill Challenges interesting and applicable. Many have discovered that running social encounters as skill challenges tends to hamper role playing. Mike addresses this and offers advice on when to just skip the challenge and let the role playing continue. All in all, one of the best articles this month.

The Scales of War – Part 9 – Haven of the Bitter Glass [Paragon - L12] ~ link

Piratecat of ENWorld fame (or Kevin Kulp to the outside world) gets his start in Dungeon this month with a mammoth adventure in the Scales of War campaign. Haven of Bitter Glass is immense weighing in at 83 pages! I’ll admit that I’ve not been following the SoW adventure path up to this point. This adventure has piqued my interest enough to go back and read them all. In this part of the adventure path, the party is contacted by by a githzerai to help rescue his leaders from a siege orchestrated by the githyanki invasion. After helping them the party heads to a city where a githyanki spy has infiltrated his way into the political and social scene. The group must carefully navigate the social waters to oust the spy and discover the source of the githyanki’s communications network. I have to admit that I’ve not read the entire adventure yet but so far its excellent work.

Wizards.com Features

D&D Alumni ~ link

Bart Carroll and Steve Winter trace the history of the druid and the bard across the different editions of D&D. For those interested in the history of D&D its an interesting look at two of the classes that have probably changed the most from their original forms (especially the druidic fighter/thief aka. Bard).

Excerpts: Arcane Hunter ~ link

From Arcane Power – the Arcane Hunter is a Paragon Path for Swordmages. This paragon path targets a creature’s vulnerabilities and resistances trying to maximize its ability to deal different types of damage. Its an interesting take to address the issues with resistances that Mike Mearls weighed in on in February.

Excerpt: Vestige Pact ~ link

From Arcane Power – Like the Fey Pact, Infernal Pact, Star Pact, and Dark Pact (as well as the Pacts from 3rd party companies like Adamant Entertainment) Arcane Power brings us a new pact ~ the Vestige Pact. Drawing from the excellent 3.5 Tome of Magic’s Binder class, this new option for Warlocks allows you to bind to a vestige as part of a daily attack power. That bind enhances the at-will power that you get as well as the pact boon. Its a nifty translation of the binder’s abilities and is similar to the barbarian’s rage in a few ways. I like it and look forward to seeing more vestige attack powers.

Dungeonaday.com

Rooms 17-21

The new rooms in the Dragon’s Delve this week are really interesting. They are all centered around the adventurer Serrestique who carved out a section of the dungeon for herself so that she could study the legendary Mages Four. The rooms this week show some of the traps she set and the treasure they guard. Each room continues to be unique, interesting, and yet tied together in a fascinating way. I continue to look forward to the rooms presented every day.

The Lost Shepherd ~ link

The Lost Shepherd is one of three taverns in the nearby town of Brindenford. This article introduces some of the NPCs who work in the tavern, the prices for room and board, as well as some hooks for characters looking to immerse themselves in the location around the Dragon’s Delve in between delves.

The Aesthetics of Maps ~ link

Monte continues to talk about his love of dungeon map design and some more thoughts he puts into creating a dynamic, living environment with such static encounter locations. Realism and the art of the design are the focus of his article though he does also indicate how Dwarven Forge dungeon terrain has influenced his design and other suggested options for presenting the dungeon to players (such as Ed Bourelle’s Skeleton Key Games)

Adventure Hooks (Open Content) ~ link

Monte presents the first two hooks in an ongoing series. Each hook can be used independently to encourage players to investigate certain aspects of the Dragon’s Delve or in conjunction. The first two involve a stolen bracer taken by the Bestial Host, and a lost Werewolf who left town a year prior. Both present interesting hooks for characters and I could see these as well as the rumors used all together to get each of the different party members a different focus for exploration. This page is included as preview material.

Puzzles ~ link

This short article presents Monte’s take on designing riddles and puzzles. His advice is to make them relatively simple and to offer multiple ways to get around the puzzle so that they don’t hinder parties not interested in solving brain-teasers.

Open Design – Halls of the Mountain King

Note that the posts on design below are closed content for patrons only. Details on patronage are also below.

I’m not sure why I forgot to include Open Design in the first blog post I wrote. For those unfamiliar with it, Open Design is a project by Wolfgang Baur to write an adventure or supplement for a small audience of patrons. The patrons select topics for the book, offer suggestions on where they want to see the book going, build monsters, treasure, traps, and more all in a blog based environment. Then Wolfgang goes off and writes amazing adventures exactly how patrons want them. The projects cost around the $25 entry fee and all patrons will receive a PDF copy of the adventure once its over. That’s normally a pretty high price point for a PDF, but the experience and the wealth of knowledge that Wolfgang shares is well worth it. Many even choose to take a greater role in the projects as senior patrons at a higher price point.

I’ve been a member of every open design project save the first, Steam and Brass. So far that includes Castle Shadowcrag, Empire of the Ghouls, Arabian Nights, Blood of the Gorgon, Tales of Zobeck, Wrath of the River King. The latest project is Halls of the Mountain King, a dwarven super adventure. This one is being written by senior patrons largely who all pitched adventures to the patrons. Its a new direction for Open Design and I’m keen to see how it goes. The adventure is being written for 3.5, but the 4e patrons choose to stay on and support a 4e edition which will be completed after the 3.5 version. The adventure will also be accompanied by a Gazetteer full of dwarven goodness written almost entirely by Wolfgang. That too will be re-written for the 4e crowd after the other one is finished.

Halls of the Mountain King is open for patrons still though the design is almost complete. Patrons of Halls can still purchase the Wrath of the River King and Tales of Zobeck projects. Click here for more information.

This week we’ve had three articles written by the patrons designing the adventure. Each asks the other patrons for advice on design decisions.

• Design Notebook – the Prime Anvils
• Design Notebook – Puzzle Doors
• Design Notebook – The Broken Door

Heraldry: Wintersheim ~ link

Wolfgang has also written an article on the dwarven heraldry used by the Cantons of the Halls. I’ve never studied Heraldry before so its interesting to see how my clan’s crest would be described.

Kobold Quarterly

And another one I forgot last week. KQ is a quarterly magazine put out by Wolfgang Baur. Having read just above you see that I’m a fan of his. He used to be Dragon Magazine’s editor back in the day and now he has turned that experience into a great little magazine. Eric Mona calls it the spiritual successor of Dragon. The magazine presents great articles by leading freelancers and budding talent. Last issue was Winter 2008, Issue 8 and it featured a number of articles on new monsters, legends of the golem, a new school of magic based on ink, and many others. The next issue should be out in April I think.

On top of all the great content in each of the magazines, Kobold Quarterly posts regular articles on their site. While the magazine is of course for sale, the online content is free. Each week Wolfgang posts a new monster in his Monster Mondays. Other regular articles include Traps Tuesday and Friday Funnies.

Monster Monday: 4E Doomsayer Hag ~ link

Many of these articles are written by freelancers, in this case however we are treated to a creature by Wolfgang. The Doomsayer Hag for 4th edition reminds me of the hags from Macbeth. It can call the spirits of the dead and confound the living with prophesies and visions of the hero’s death. The design uses immobilizing and dazing conditions to simulate the confusion caused by the hag’s prophesies. The shades of the dead block access to the hag, forced to protect their tormentor. A very flavorful and interesting addition to my monster collection.

RPG Superstar Showdown ~ link

Wolfgang was one of the judges in Paizo’s RPG Superstar again this year, joining Clark Peterson and Sean Reynolds. The four finalists this year are:

• Dragonrest Isle by Kevin Carter
• Denying the Boiling Beast by Matthew Stinson
• Realm of the Fellnight Queen by Niel Spice
• Last Ride of the Mammoth Lords by Eric Bailey

Water Hazards ~ link

Maurice De Mare presents three water based traps for 3.5e. The cold shower trap unleashes freezing water on an area dousing flames and chilling those in the radius of the trap. The drowning pool is a shallow puddle with an elaborate telekinesis trap that tries to drown the target of the trap in the 1ft deep pool. The reversed water well trap
is a reversed gravity trap that sends hapless adventurers up past an illusionary wall into a shaft filled with water. If the reverse gravity spell is negated the water in the shaft rushes out in a huge gush that damages people nearby and flushes them away.

Blog Roll

There were a few large themes in this past week’s blog posts in the RPG blogging sphere. Most of them were found on the RPG Blogger’s Network. I’ll reiterate OMG they have a lot of posts every week. I took part in the first Blog Carnival with my previous entry on the Oilliphéist, an Irish legend.

St. Patty’s Day Blog Carnival ~ link

Conducted by the Gamer Traveler, Daniel Perez, the St. Patrick’s day carnival had a bunch of posts both amusing and serious. Daniel’s Banshee of Kilmainham Gaol was the best of the bunch, show casing his own experiences with a banshee with very tense prose. Amusing posts included the Leprechaun paper mini for use with the Leprechaun racial stats for 4e and the Lair of the Leprechaun in the shape of a shamrock. It was fun to listen to the Adventuring Party podcast hosted in Ireland while reading all these blogs.

Open Gaming Table Anthology ~ link

I’ll most likely have more to say on this during this week’s blog roll next Monday as the book launched today. The Open Gaming Table Anthology is a collection of works by bloggers in the RPG Blogger’s Network on advice, game material, design and many more topics. At 140 pages its destined to be chock full of gaming goodness. If only Lulu was not as expensive to ship to Canada.

War Blog Carnival ~ link

Run by the blog Book of Rev this month’s blog carnival, a monthly feature in the blog-o-sphere is on war. I’ve not used war in any of my campaigns so I’ve not been as involved in these posts this week. The Critical Hits post on War in Low Level campaigns has me intrigued, as have the posts by A Butterfly Dreaming on A Harvest of Men.

Great Posts

• Chatty DM – Robin’s Laws Revisited
• Chatty DM – Megadungeon
• RPG Blog II – Interview with Pathfinder Lead Designer
• At-Will – Failure is an Option

Podcasts

• Fear the Boot 140 – Playing Bad Guys

Completely Unrelated

• Steampunk the Mysterious Explorations of Jasper Morello

Filed under:
Weekly Review by Chris Cumming