Mar 23-29

Things seem to wind down in the last week of the month. This week we’ve got a few playtest and excerpt articles from Wizards, Monte’s Top 10 Rules for GMing, Open Design moves into playtest mode, and KQ delivers another creepy creature. Thanks to Daniel Perez who clued me into the daily summary emails from RPG Blogger’s Network, they are so much easier to digest each day than the huge number of duplicates in the RSS feed. The emails contain short descriptions of each post also making it easy to spot interesting articles.

Remember you can follow my shared items on Google Reader for a daily view of articles that I feature here once a week. You can also follow me on Twitter, though I’ll add a link to the right of this blog in the near future. I’m also working on setting up Warpig radio syndication when I work through some technical difficulties.

Dragon Magazine

Note that these articles require a subscription to DDI to access.

Design and Development – The Primal Power Source ~ link

James Wyatt, Mike Mearls, and Rob Heinsoo talk about the process that they went through to build the new power source in PHB2 in this month’s Design and Development. It was interesting to see the evolution of the concept of a druid as a representative of nature gods to one of the world spirit. It sounds very Final Fantasy to me though the concept draws on a lot of historical context. Personally I will be tying the Spirit world to the ideas used in Avatar or those of Shintaoism in Japan. Its amusing to see how Mike’s inspiration on the spirit world came from The Temple of Elemental Evil and H1: The Village of Hommlet. I remember encountering the druid in the grove and the tension between the old gods and the new.

Confessions of a Full-time Wizard ~ link

Shelly Mazzanoble’s column is a humor piece about discussions within R&D. I’m not sure what target market these columns are for, but they are not for me. I’ve largely ignored them in the past and in reading through this month’s installment I think that I’ll continue to do that.

Dungeon Magazine

Note that these articles require a subscription to DDI to access.

Vicious Venues – Incadescent Smithy ~ link

Skip and Penny Williams present us with the only article this week for Dungeon Magazine, it did not end the month on a high note. The vicious venue in question is a smithy operated by a pair of Azers over an open magma flow. While a unique location for a friendly smithy, it wasn’t very appealing to me. The hooks on how to make it a combat were good but kind of went against how I saw it presented up front.

Wizards.com Features

Ivanite © Apis Teicher, 2009

Character Builder Update ~ link

Note that Character Builder requires a DDI subscription, though access to this article does not. That said, Didier Monin brings us the big news of the month for me. I find that the Character Builder is the most useful tool in the subscription. All of my players have created their characters using the tool and they had a blast doing it. It made character creation so much easier. I also use it for all my 4e PbP characters and just love tooling around with it. This update brough all the PHB2 content to the Character Builder instantly expanding it with a huge amount of content. I played around and build a doppelganger bard, a shifter warden, a deva avenger, and a dragonborn sorceror and had a lot of fun doing so. I know that I’ll likely continue building random characters just for the heck of it. The last player in my party playing a human shaman will now be able to create her character too.

Excerpts – Orc Stronghold [Heroic, L3] ~ link

From Dungeon Delve – I think this dungeon delve was better than the one presented in Dungeon this month. This one is actually in the Dungeon Delve book and makes interesting use of the Dungeon Tiles to create interesting encounters for level 3 adventurers.

Excerpts – Summoning Magic ~ link

From Arcane Power – With this preview and the previous one that James Wyatt published I’m really keen to see what a summoning wizard can do. There is one additional summoning daily power in this article, Summon Fire Warrior, but also previewed is the first conjuration. Conjurations are apparently encounter or at-will versions of summons that affect enemies by conjuring creatures to attack once. They don’t stick around long, but the spell effects look and feel more like creatures attacking.  Sounds neat to me.

Excerpts – Cosmic Magic ~ link

From Arcane Power – Cosmic Magic presents another source of arcane power for the new PHB2 sorceror that we’ll see in Arcane Power this month. It’s interesting to see that we’ll have support for new PHB2 classes in a book released just a month later. When I started reading this article I thought that the line between Warlock and Sorceror continued to blur with Star Pact vs. Cosmic Magic a little too close conceptually. Reading the abilities and the phases of the cosmos abilities prooved me wrong. These two classes will play quite differently even though they are both arcane strikers.

Dungeonaday.com

Note that these articles require a subscription to Dungeonaday.com to access.

Rooms 22 to 26

This week Monte continues to expand on Si.. and her interest in the Mages Four with largely non-combat dungeon rooms that present puzzles, traps, and just interesting encounter locations. I hope that adventurers entering this section really catch on to the hook and look forward to finding out more about both the Mages Four and Si.. herself.

Monte’s Top 10 Rules for DMing ~ link

Flexibility and consistency are key to Monte’s rules on how to DM a good game. From the guy who wrote the 3rd edition DMG it is interesting to see how his advice years ago still holds true after 9 years. I’m not sure when he wrote this list, but Monte indicates that it was a number of years ago and that it is still pertinent today. Largely Monte suggests that DMs work to understand their players, what the players like, and what they as a DM like to run to make the game fun for all.

Listen Check 2 ~ link (Open)

In this episode Monte speaks more on the background of Dungeonaday.com and some of the ways that he is looking to expand it. It was nice to hear him plug the efforts of the community, including the 4E conversion effort that a couple of us members have started. We’ve covered most of the rooms that have come out to date.

NPC: Evinarus ~ link

Evinarus is presented as a friendly NPC that is hanging around outside the dungeon. He wants to accompany the party into the delve and is able to provide them with helpful advice and directions through a few of the opening rooms.  But does he have a hidden agenda? Is he being as helpful as he makes out to be?

Open Design

Note that these articles require a subscription to Open Design to access.

Open Design moves into one of the final phases this week. Many of the patron designed pieces of the adventure have come in as playtest manuscripts.  The patrons selected for playtesting will begin now and will have a few weeks to run through the material and generate reports on the encounters providing valuable feedback to their authors.  Once the playtest reports start rolling in we’ll get a good glimpse of how the encounters play out.  After that the books head into editing and then layout. It’ll probably be another couple of months till we get the final product.

This project is being written for the 3.5 edition of the rules and will be accompanied by a Gazateer of the Dwarven Cantons. We 4th edition fans had enough of us stick around to talk Wolfgang into producing a full conversion of the adventure as well as a separate book of dwarven goodies all in 4th edition.  Both the gazateer and the 4e book will each be 64 pages.  Currently all patrons are either one edition or the other, but Wolfgang announced today on the messageboards that he will be developing a dual track system for those of us (myself included) who play both editions.

This week we have a few small updates as we move into the playtest phase.

• Design Notebook: Grand Lodge
• Heraldry
• Status: 4 Playtest Manuscripts Complete

Kobold Quarterly

Monster Monday: Grimdaw or Ghoul Crow ~ link

Written by Richard Pett and John Robey, these creepy black crows or ravens feature faces or appendages that appear to be human. Sometimes the faces or even just eyes or lips of these birds are covered in flesh at times they are just exposed bone. For 3.5 the Grimdaw and the Grimdaw Miseries (a swarm of grimdaw) remind me of The Raven by Edgar Alan Poe and channelling Poe is never bad.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“‘Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door-
Only this, and nothing more.”

….

The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe, 1845

Ask the Kobold: Succubi and Enervation ~ link

Skip Williams continues to share his encyclopedic knowledge of the 3.5 rules answers some bizarre questions about succubi and enervation. Where these groups manage to come up with these situations is beyond me, but it certainly makes for entertaining reading. I mean the opening sentence begins with “Say I cast the simulacrum spell on a succubus (for, you know, science). ” funny stuff all of which Skip answers with alacrity.

Blogroll

There were some great blog posts in the RPG blogsphere this week. Many of the blogs touched on more PHB 2 coverage.  The gamefiend’s At Will blog covered the avenger in play and it was quite an interesting article about the most intriguing and fresh classes from the book.  Mike Mearls had a great post this week as well on improvisation and how to use acting methodology at the game table.

• RPG Blog 2 – Interview with Jason Bulmahn
• Critical Hits – Ranged Warlord
• A Butterfly Dreaming – War and How to Wage It
• At Will – PHB2 In Play: The Avenger
• Mike Mearls – Carefully Prepared Improvisation

Podcasts

Some of these are a bit of catch up for me, especially the Pulp Gamer ones. I have fallen a bit behind on my podcast listening given the added reading I’ve taken on for this blog. But not to fear, I’ve delved back into it this week and have quite a few to recommend.  The highlights of this week were Have Games, Will Travel’s look at narrative control where Paul Tevis talks about failure forward which was covered in one of the blogs from last week by At Will. I was also keenly interested in what the Gamer Traveler had to say about Kobe Japan. Daniel Perez spoke with a good friend of his while in Puerto Rico who had been in Kobe on a MTG tournament.  While living in Japan for 3 years, I never had the chance to visit Kobe so it was something new for me though it made me a bit homesick.

• Fear the Boot – Interview #8 – Trampas Whiteman
• RPG Countdown – Mar 11-24
• Atomic Array – #19 Gestalt
• Pulp Gamer – Out of Character – #70 More on Mechanics
• Pulp Gamer – Out of Character – #71 Bon Voyage
• Have Games Will Travel – For a Few Games More – #37 Narrative Control
• The Gamer Traveler – #11 Kobe, Japan

Well thats a bit shorter this week, though it certainly didn’t feel like it with all that reading.  I’m finding new ways to organize my thoughts and put these posts together as time goes on. Hopefully I will continue to refine them and attract traffic to the site. I will also be putting together more creative pieces in the next bit on 4e material.

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Weekly Review by Chris Cumming