Waiting until September is going to suck.

It’s not that there are no good D&D releases between now and then.  PHB2 looks like it’s going to be a lot of fun, and the latest sneak peek at The Warden looks particularly badass, though I’m not sure I’ve really wrapped my head around the feel of it yet.  I’m excited about Arcane Power if only to keep my Wizard players happy. Eberron’s coming, and I admit that grabs me more than the Forgotten Realms.  Plus, there will no doubt be very interesting third party stuff between now and then, and perhaps the long awaited changes to the GSL will emerge in the meantime.

But September is when we can expect the DMG2.

Now, I was already pretty gung ho for this.  I considered the DMG the real surprise gem of the 4e lineup, and the prospect of more of the same, with things like skill challenges fleshed out a little more, is something I really want to see.  In many of the same ways I’m expecting the classes in the PHB2 to have a bit more polish than that core classes, I’m expecting the DMG2 to be the book that really starts realizing the promise of a lot of things that are currently only seeds.  This is kind of a big deal because much of my love of 4e comes of looking at it and seeing the game it could be even more than the game it is. I really hope to see that promise mature, and I have a lot of confidence that it will.

But Bill Slavicsek’s latest Ampersand column delivered the real whammy for me.  The DMG2 is going to have a writeup of Sigil, signature city of the Planescape setting, and a place near and dear to my little fanboy heart.   It got a little coverage in the Manual of the Planes, but the prospect of using it as a showpiece in the DMG2 is exciting as hell to me. But it also makes the wait until September all the more painful.

We’ll see how the timing works out. The Manual of the Planes definitely inspired me to start a Shadowfell campaign, and I’ve been working on the notes and plans for it, and the big question for me is whether the DMG2 is going to come out in time for my players to make it out into the planes at large.  This may end up being the first time I don’t begrudge scheduling delays in a campaign.

I’m reading the new Manual of the Planes and enjoying it a lot. I’m really the target audience for this one - I have every Planescape product I could ever get my hands on, and I have always loved this part of D&D. When 3e loosened up on the Planescape model I was ok with it (except for the fomorians - seriously, who thinks fomorians are cooler than modrons?) because things had been left intentionally fuzzy. You could still do Planescape if you wanted, but if you wanted the drunken cosmology of the Forgotten Realms, that was an option too.

4e has come in with a more concrete cosmology that’s a bit less out there, but it also had the promise of making the planes a valid avenue for play. Since this was something I loved about Planescape - that a planar campaign could start at level 1 - I was curious to see that promise delivered on. Now that the MoP is out, it doesn’t quite deliver what I expected, but what it does deliver is enough to make me content.

So, first and foremost you basically get enough Sigil that if you already have Planescape in your head, you’re good to go. I’m not sure how that entire section reads to someone who’s not a Planescape fan but I was happy for the nod, especially compared to the passing treatment it got in the 3e MoP.

Beyond that there seems to be a general assumption of progression that you can start adventuring in the Feywild and Shadowfell reasonably early on, and that Elemental Chaos and the Astral Sea open up in Paragon play (with the caveat that all planes are available as one-offs). This is not a bad model, and they definitely have made the Feywild and Shadowfell vastly more interesting to me in this book, but I’m glad this guideline seems to be loose rather than an absolute underpinning.

Elemental Chaos and the Astral Sea are full of neat stuff, which is what I would expect. Lots of useful and fun seeds. They’re fun to read and I have only so much to add (except that I’m trying to figure out why the illustration on page 95 looks so familiar).

The mechanical material is nice, but without too many surprises. A nice monster section, with a heavy emphasis on devils and demons, and a nice mix of classics (Dispater!, the Astral Behemoth), Planescape stuff (Keepers, Bladelings) with a few new additions like the demon lord Graz’zt . The levels skew high (Graz’zt is level 32) but that is no surprise, and it nicely fills out some gaps in the monster manual. Plus, as a bonus they offer the information to make Bladelings a playable race.

The Paragon paths are a little less exciting than I’d hoped, mostly because they have a little bit less flexibility than I look for. It’s basically one new Paragon Path per class, with warlocks & wizards smooshed together and rangers getting the hose unless they happen to be eladrin. These paths really showcase some of the real strengths and weaknesses of the Paragon path system. The strengths are that some of them are interesting and flavorful, but the weaknesses are that these are broadly flavorful in a way that makes one ask “Why can only fighters be doomguard?”

The rituals are mostly utilitarian in that they’re all the things you’d want to have in play for a planar game. They do their job, but with no real surprises, except perhaps for the welcome return of Rope Trick.

The magic items are fun, with a heavy emphasis on elemental and teleportation effects. Flipping through them looking for the big red flag (which is to say: encounter powers) the armors ended up worrying me. Driftmetal Armor grants resistance to psychic and radiant and also has a teleportation encounter power, and is only mitigated by the fact that it’s limited to crappy armor types (Chain & Scale). On the other hand, Feytouched armor is basically “Rogues make you dead” armor. Comes in leather and hide, grants a bonus to initiative, and as an encounter power it makes you invisible until the end of your next turn (though thankfully it is a standard action, so there’s a little mitigation). After those, I admit everything else looked much better, with a few stand outes. There are some very clever orbs that mess with teleportation and the welcome presence of Githyanki Silver Swords. There’s also a little more rogue love in the form of shadowstrike weapons, and an unfortunately named “loadstone” stands out a little. Round it all out with planar vehicles, like spelljammers and astral skiffs, and it’s a fun collection.

The overall quality of the content is quite high, with lots of useful, playable seeds. There are some nice easter eggs (The Isle of Dread is in the Feywild!) which are good to see. More importantly, there are only a few occasions where I feel like I’m being told about someone else’s game rather than being given material for mine. That’s always my big fear with setting books, so I breathed a sigh of relief at that one.

If I were to really sit down and try to put my finger on this book in the context of other planar material, what I think stands out most is the lack of dangling threads. One of the strengths (or weaknesses) of Planescape was a design that embraced some really whacked-out stuff, and which allowed for huge, impossible things to get dropped in places with no explanation and with an expectation that you woudl just roll with it. This new MoP has much less of that (and, in fact, quietly provides answers for a great many questions that Planescape left open) and it’s a double edged blade. The cosmology has fewer moving parts these days, and everything makes more sense, while still leaving room for weirdness. That’s pretty cool, but the tradeoff is that the planes no longer feel that big. They are finite and knowable, at least comparatively. I really don’t know how I feel about that - on one hand I miss the grander sweep of things, but on the other I really dig how well this syncs with the 30 level model and creates something the players can really sink their teeth into and own.

I think it really reflects a valuable lesson from Exalted, that the thing which will determine if your characters are truly world-shaking badasses is how the rest of the world is put together. Despite my long standing Planescape love, I suspect it’s a change for the better. And without a unified artistic vision of the kind Planescape had, I suspect it’s also an absolutely necessary change.

I’m pretty happy with it as a whole, so I leave with a few random thoughts:

• The Gnomes, Halflings and Dark Ones are all one race through different filters theory remains strong. In my heart, Dark Ones == Birthright Halflings.
• There are only two cities with maps in the book (The City of Brass in elemental chaos and Gloomwrought in the Shadowfell) which has the effect of making me zero in on them as places to use as the hub or starting point of a campaign. There are interesting places in the Feywild and the Astral Sea, but the lack of maps means I think of them as places to visit, not centers of play. It’s really crazy how powerful a good map can be.
• Man, if you are a Warlock and want to flesh out the details of your pact, this book is like a giant candy shop.
• Gith. All kinds.
• There is a nice emphasis on describing powerful bad guys in terms of how they can impact your whole campaign. The advice tends to be repetitive (face their cultists, then their servants, then their lieutenants, then the big bad) but it’s nice to see it given attention.
• The prospect of doing a “The Lies of Locke Lamora” game based in Gloomwrought will not leave my head. I have already started naming the streets.
• The Air Archons look like they will be incredibly fun to throw into a fight, and I think they’re my favorite monster in the book.
• The Astral Dreadnaught is cool and all, but as far as I can tell they best strategy for beating one is “Get swallowed” since it seems like you can pretty much attack the thing with impunity once you’re inside. Easily tweaked to fix, but a little funny.
• Unlike the Gloomwrought and City of Brass maps, the map of the nine hells is wasted space. It’s technically lovely - no slight to the cartographer - but it is neither useful nor inspiring. I wish the space had been used for almost anything else.
• Man, someone likes Graz’zt. His monster entry is 4 pages long, twice as long as Dispater or Baphomet. This isn’t a bad thing - he’s a little blandly evil but nothing too bad - but it leaves me wondering if he’s supposed to be a signature bad guy or what.
• Lots of nice Raven Queen tidbits throughout, though the story that she took the death slot from Nerull the Reaper is kind of funny and kind of, “er, what?”
• Tytherion, the realm of eternal night, home of Tiamat and Zehir is a bit too close to “Tritherion” for my tastes.
• The Astral Sea section makes a big deal about how everything important in the astral sea has been claimed by someone, but then about a third of the realms presented are unclaimed. I actually like that ratio, but it raised eyebrows as I read.
• Just a general shout out - the art in this one was really solid and fun, with a number of standout pieces, especialy among the chapter frontspieces. After the uneven art in Martial Power, that was welcome.  I think the Shadowfell fronstpiece, while maybe not my favorite in the book, deserves points for managing  to sell me on the Shadowfell as a cool place just by making me look at it differently..
• Baba Yaga’s in the Feywild, and that pleases me to no end.
• I apparently need to remember that Astral Stalkers are ‘Abominations’ to find them in the MM.

The rogue is the best class in 4e. I feel pretty comfortable saying this, though I realize some qualifiers are in order. It’s not the deadliest class (ranger) or the twinkiest class (swordmage), the most versatile class (wizard), the most nuanced class (fighter) or even the all around MVP (I go Warlord for this, but that’s softer). Instead, it is the class that is, as presented, most in tune with the rules of the game.

See, first and foremost 4e is a game about movement and engaging the board. Every class has some movement capabilities and has reasons to engage the board, but rogues have a very synergistic setup with their backstabs. This ability gives a strong incentive to move and a clear lens through which to view the board that provides an array of meaningful choices as the rogue looks for opportunities to seize combat advantage. That combination is important since some classes may excel at one point or another - rangers and some warlocks are more mobile, fighters have a clearer lens and so on - but for those other classes it takes time and experience to find the sweet spot for play. Running around the edges of a fight or standing toe to toe with the big bad can be cool, but they don’t necessarily offer the same clear set of meaningful choices a rogue gets every turn.

Still, if that was all then it would really just be a difference of learning curve - other classes get rewarding too and the rogue is just the fastest route. But the rogue has another advantage - his advancement is just that much cooler than everyone else.

Now, I’m not asserting his powers are cooler. Everyone has cool powers, so I consider those to be a wash. Where the rogue gets more interesting is in the domain of feat selection. I have made a lot of characters, and there’s a pattern you start seeing with feats that is perhaps most obvious when your wizard hits 2nd or 4th level and loudly declares “These feats all suck.” And the thing is, he’s kind of right, at least for a wizard. There aren’t a lot of feats that help him do the things he does better or more interestingly (and even the ones he might want, the keyword ones, tend to have crappy reqs) so he’s stuck taking generic feats for a lack of anything more interesting (at least until he changes tiers - higher level feats are a wizards saving grace). In contrast, I have never made a rogue and not wanted more feats. So many feats interact well with how a rogue is played that you can never get enough of them.

This is a really big deal, and it exists as a sort of spectrum from the rogue at the top to the wizard at the bottom, and if there’s one reason the game needs more feats, it is to get to the point where the wizards and clerics and others of the world have more options than the same handful of feats, then nothing until they change tiers.

Lastly, and this is a point I’ve touched upon before, rogues probably have the best model for how to handle the interplay between stats and character effectiveness, allowing for one clear primary stat, and branching off from there based on substats. Building a rogue that mechanically satisfies your vision is just easier than doing so with, say, a Paladin.

Anyway, all this is important because it means when I’m faced with a general question about how something should be done, I tend to look at the rogue first as an example. That is not to say I want other classes to have powers and effects like the rogue, but rather that I want rules to introduce options that make things as clearly engaging for other classes as they are for the rogue. My hope is that eventually there will be enough support that other classes have equally clear paths to engagement (and some come close already - Martial Power was a nice bump for the martial classes in general) but doing so is going to take some work. There are a few roadblocks built into the core rules that need to be knocked down or worked around, but I think that’s doable.

I’m knee-deep in development of Poisoncraft. I recently had a design breakthrough that had been giving me some fits. One of the core features of the Poisoncraft line is the poison creation system. And one of the core goals of the poison creation system is both a unified design and the ability to account for poisons already released by Wizards. That’s not always an easy thing. I remember when I was working on the original Poisoncraft, I had a terrible time trying to account for the absurdly low cost of drow poison indicated in the DMG. In the end, I had to fudge a little.

With Fourth Edition, the designers have done a great job of applying a unified design theory to just about everything. This makes the reverse engineering job that much easier, natch. Still, there’s always some fly in the ointment. This time around, it was the discrepancy between the costing of poisons in the DMG and the Adventurer’s Vault. We have poisons of similar level and effect with pretty drastic price differences. For the longest time, I couldn’t crack the code. Until yesterday….

I identified an extremely subtle yet crucial and ultimately satisfying discrepancy between the poisons themselves. The poisons in AV are one-shot consumables; they are effective for a single target and a single attack. The poisons in the DMG are effective for an entire encounter (more on this in a bit). Though it is not expressly identified in either text, this distinction gives us two classes of poisons. Part of the confusion comes from the fact that they are both simply referred to as “poison”. To avoid this confusion I’ve tentatively titled them transient poisons and persistent poisons. Once we make this distinction, it is a relatively simple matter to develop creation systems for both.

As a bonus, these two classes of poison bring with them a larger design space as well. Now I can have poison families with rules for one class of poison, utility powers that only affect one class of poison, etc. How about a metapoison feat that allows a transient poison to last for two attacks? In play, these two classes of poison are susceptible to different strategies. A transient poison would do the trick for an assassination attempt; a persistent poison would be the better choice against the big battle with the BBEG.

Now, as promised, a note about the persistent quality of DMG poisons. The text is a little obtuse, and I’ve seen more than a few people misread it. However, I’m certain that the rule is as I read it. The text indicates:

The poison takes effect the next time the weapon hits and deals damage. The poison’s effect is a secondary attack against the same target. If a poisoned weapon hits multiple targets, the poison attacks only the first target hit. Apply a Poison: Apply poison to a weapon. This is a standard action. Poison applied to a weapon loses its potency at the end of the encounter or after 5 minutes have passed.

Some people have read the phrase “the poison attacks only the first target hit” to mean that the poison affects that first target and then stops being effective altogether. However, that interpretation improperly discounts the introductory clause “If a poisoned weapon hits multiple targets”. The term “target” has a specific meaning, i.e., the subject of a specific single attack. It should not be confused with its general use as a synonym of enemy or opponent. It is evident that the limitation is there to avoid giving a disparate advantage for using poison to classes with a greater number of multiple-target weapon attacks. Compare the impact a persistent poison that affected all targets would have on a dual-wielding ranger as opposed to a warlock.

Reading Dragon Magazine’s preview content is always interesting, but it was particularly interesting to me this month to see the preview material for Adventurer’s Vault II (you’ll probably need a subscription to D&D Insider to view it).

Those of you who’ve picked up our latest product, The Shroudborn Multiclass, can probably guess what’s caught my interest. It’s the orbs.

In the preview Wizards is offering, there are a few orb items, mostly epic tier and extreme late paragon tier, that they’ve ornately labeled as Orbs of Sequestered Conflict.  It’s a case of parallel evolution as it turns out, because just a couple weeks before Wizards leaked this playtestable peek, our own Shroudborn Multiclass came out with a few powers that feature the Arena keyword — which, in essence, is exactly what the sequestering orbs do:

The arena Keyword

A small number of shroudborn powers—howling abyss strike, howling abyss dive, and howling abyss onslaught—have the new arena keyword. The arena keyword indicates a power that, in essence, comes with its own map, by introducing a second battlefield into the fight, often with limited access for a few combatants. In the case of the shroudborn abilities mentioned above, this arena map is the howling abyss…

The howling abyss, in its scope, is in a few ways a little more ambitious (or at least a bit larger) than the sequestered areas of the orbs, but there’s a lot of overlap going on.  Both the howling abyss arena and the sequestered areas feature altered environments and the ability to isolate one or more targets from the main battlefield in the hopes of taking advantage of the opposition.  Regardless of the way you get your arena, it’s bound to have a bit of a Thunderdome feel to it: locking yourself into a separate dimension with the big bad might turn the tide of the main battle, but whether or not you’ll live to see the victory is an open question.

Regardless of whether you’re taking on the howling abyss or one of AV2’s orbs, it’s worth giving it some careful thought.  As the AV2 playtest notes, you’ll want to think twice before allowing them into your game (for one, it might feel “uncool” to allow a character to do a bit of grandstanding and seize part of the battlefield as his own; and for two, it could really bust up a well-planned set-piece).   But even if you do accept these arenas into your game, you’ll want to make sure you have the sequestered areas drawn or printed up in advance, and an area on the table where they can be set down separate from the main battlefield.

But at the end of the day, I’m just jazzed that an idea we developed separately has shown up as well in the official upcoming material from Wizards of the Coast.  A solid indication that at One Bad Egg, we’re on the right track!

Curse you Mouse Guard. I haven’t even read you yet, and already I am inspired.

So, in 4e, The disease and poison rules do a great job of handling very specific sorts of situations that can be dramatically appropriate to the dungeon. Poison and disease are extra elements of danger that can spice up encounter-driven danger, but their specific (and slightly complex) nature makes them tools of a very specific nature.

Conditions, on the other hand, have been a joy in their simplicity and effectiveness - they do one thing and do them well, and they are easy to keep track of.

Now, the reason these two points resonate with each other in my mind was really inspired by the discussion of the new Mouse Guard rpg and its handling of status, and dovetailed with one of the frustrations with skill challenges in 4e. Basically, there are only so many ways to mechanically support an interesting failure in a skill challenge. The idea of having a failure cost skill challenges is a useful one, but it can only go so far. Mouse Guard supports the idea of characters ending up hungry or thirsty or tired, and it really seemed like there’s no reason that 4e couldn’t do the same thing.

So with that in mind I suggest the idea of extended conditions. An extended condition is just like any other condition - it has rules that indicate what sort of mechanical impact the condition imposes. The sole difference comes from how they end. Extended conditions usually go away after you’ve taken an extended rest, but some of them require some additional criteria, noted as “End:” in the description.

Extended Conditions

I suspect this really just scratches the surface of possibilities, and I encourage people to think of other extended conditions. Once you have a few of these in pocket, then suddenly you have slightly more interesting currency to tie to a skill challenge than just taking away healing surges. Characters who fail their skill check crossing the desert stumble out thirsty. Guards who spend the night watching a house might end up tired.

It’s a pretty lightweight little rule, but give it a try next time you bust out a skill challenge, and you may find it gives it a little more *oomph*.

So, when WOTC previewed the Druid, I must admit that my first thought was “They finally did it - they’ve finally legitimized stat substitution for calculating AC.” That is probably not the first thing most people zeroed in on. Things like the triple at-will powers, the fact the Druids are all Shifty and the various questions surrounding unarmed attacks might be more likely to suggest themselves, but it’s something I’ve kind of had my eye on since the Swordmage came out. It’s a door I’ve been resisting opening, but that resistance is definitely strongly undercut.

Anyway, the other thing the Druid did is remind me it might be worth talking about the great feedback we got on the Witch Doctor. There was enough of it that there’s no real way for me to address it all point for point, but there were a number of questions and issues that came up, and I want to run down through them a bit.

• ‘Range Blast 2′. This is easy to describe in conversation - it’s just a 2×2 square - but it gets profoundly more convoluted when you get into the specifics of terminology of 4e. This is basically going to need a sidebar the same way close walls do. This will also probably re-open the question of whether or not we should just define a ray/bolt type for walls that go in a straight line and call it a day.
• Defenses - Yes, the Witch doctor has very high defenses, with the mask providing slightly better bonuses than any other class. The exception to this is AC, where the Witch Doctor totally bombs. That initial idea - low AC but high scores in other defenses - works out interestingly in play, but may be too clever for its own good, and this will probably need to get smoothed out.
• Masks, Implements and Weapons - The interplay between masks and head slot items badly needs clarification, and I need to make weapon and implement juggling a little more graceful. The masks also need some general tweaking.
• Cage of Lighting - This one is very clear in my head, but I apparently do not yet have the language clear on the page.

That said, there’s one big issue that came up in a small number of feedbacks, but which has really grown on me as I’ve worked on things, and that is the question of two primary stats and the impact it has on powers. Right now, about half the WD powers take Charisma as their primary stat and the other half take Constitution. This is not unique to the Witch Doctor - the Warlock, Cleric and Paladin are similarly split - but I have grown less enamored of this approach over time. I haven’t liked the things I’ve seen in play, especially the strong sense of ‘either/or’ that comes out of the needs of optimization (and I won’t pretend 4e doesn’t depend on optimization.)

What really has impressed me is the rogue (and to a lesser extent, the Warlord) for having a crystal clear central stat but for having a really strong thematic difference based on your second best stat. It creates a difference without feeling like you’re having to either discard half your class or take some middle-of-the road approach. Certainly, some powers are better for one build or another, but the difference is that for a rogue, those powers are all still available and useful, rather that pretty much entirely off the menu, as they might be for a low strength cleric.

So I have the knife and the scalpel out, and I’m seeing what I can do to retool it with that in mind. The logical thing to do is make it charisma based, with Constitution and Wisdom as the branches, but that has two problems - I would need to add or remove a mask, I suspect, and one combo doubles up on a defense (Will in this case). As such, the more difficult but possibly more interesting option will be a triple branch - Con, Wis and Int, with each secondary tied to a mask type. It’s still experimental, but I think it just might work.

We got “mini-reviewed” over on ENWorld quite favorably! You can check out the whole post here, but if you’re just in it for the One Bad Egg goodness, you can check out Adam Dray’s excerpt of the OBE-relevant stuff over on his LJ.

Here’s an excerpt of the Unbroken mini-review, just as a teaser:

The Unbroken (One Bad Egg) — I have two words for you guys. Must. Have. The Unbroken is a paladin paragon path simulating a paladin that has broken with his god, but wants to do things that must be done, be they good or evil. Thematically, it’s hardly breaking new ground, but it is IMO a very important option to have in your campaign. But the best thing about this short PDF is that it gives you a smart way to not only handle the paladin code introduced, but that you can easily use it with the normal paladins and their relationship with their god. Hell, it could fit for any character that wants some sort of code. At $1.49, it’s worth every penny several times over.
Rating: ******

At Gen Con, I sat down with Clyde Roher of Theory from the Closet and talked about game licenses, including the GSL from Wizards. If you are at all interested in such things, you should have a listen.

It’s particularly interesting to note that the interview was done on the last day of Gen Con, after Fred, Rob, and I had already agreed in principle on going forward with One Bad Egg.

Okay, so, I couldn’t wait.

The next One Bad Egg product will be Gods of the Shroud, a 30-page PDF covering the 13 gods of the Shroud worldseed, their beliefs, associated monsters and magic items, and including 16 new ways to channel divinity.

I’m targeting next week for its release.

In the meantime, please enjoy this free preview of the product, containing three gods — the Bone Witch, the Gleaming Eye, and the Pale Wanderer. You can pick it up here:

http://www.onebadegg.com/egg/store/#OBE1005F

If you’re a fan of One Bad Egg’s stuff, we could use your help. To help us drum up interest, please do post on your blogs and forums (new topics instead of attached to existing ones are better) telling folks where to find this!

What would you like to see in the Shroud?

Give us some suggestions! If we end up building something off of your idea, we’ll give you a free PDF of the results.

A new question for our new forum board! Join us over there, and offer your suggestions:

http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/forum/index.php?topic=757.0

Few horrors of the Shroud can match the death-mother. Found consuming entire graveyards to give birth to its terrible spawn, a single death-mother with an ample supply of corpses can bring an entire town or small city to its knees… or worse.

Inside this PDF you’ll find six new monsters for Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition, from the terrifying Death-Mother to small but deadly Bone-Child. Will your players succumb to the dreaded Bloody-Bones or the stealthy Silent Corpse? Crack open the crypt and find out, if you dare.

Horrors of the Shroud: The Death-Mother, written by Fred Hicks and Cam Banks, is a six-page PDF and is priced at $1.99.

• Release date: October 29th 2008
• Available at Indie Press Revolution
• Also available at RPGNow

Infected with dark, necrotic magics while dying, the half-dead have returned only part-way to life, their flesh afflicted by an undead curse. Though they can be killed, Death’s grip upon the half-dead is a slippery one at best. Half-dead characters—whether tragic heroes or dark villains—hound their foes relentlessly, driven to action by the horror of their condition. Many half-dead seek to hide their nature from others. When the half-dead are finally revealed for what they are, much of the world responds with horror, revulsion, and worse.

Inside this PDF you’ll find a complete player race for Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition, along with ten racial feats to bring the horror within to life. You’ll also find a monster template, a dead minotaur back for revenge, story ideas, and power cards.

Races of the Shroud: The Half-Dead, written by Fred Hicks and Lee Hammock, is a six-page PDF and is priced at $1.99.

• Release date: October 28th 2008
• Available at Indie Press Revolution
• Also available at RPGNow

What happens when the faithful lose their way? What happens when a Paladin falls?

The loss of faith can be a terrible tragedy. For many, it is the end of everything. But a few weather this trial with strength and dignity and come out stronger for it—bloodied and battered, but Unbroken.

Inside this PDF you’ll find a new paragon path for the Paladin class, a new magic item, a monster template, and a faithless angel. You’ll also find two new feats that can be used by any character at any tier to add an “aspect” of honor and sacrifice to your play.

Shrouded Paths: The Unbroken, written by Rob Donoghue and Fred Hicks, is a three-page PDF and is priced at $1.49.

• Release date: October 24th 2008
• Available at Indie Press Revolution
• Also available at RPGNow

I am holding the brand new Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game Starter Set. I was immediately nostalgic as I held the shrink wrapped box. It is the same size and heft as the good ‘ole Red Box D&D. The inner geek in me did an awkward fist pump and tore open the wrapper. I went to slip the top off the box…only to find there wasn’t one. “Wha…oh dear” escaped my lips as I found the flap at the top of the box. Man, from nostaliga to “aw crap” in like 7 seconds. Not a new record, but impressive nonetheless.

So, what’s in this kinda crappy flip-top box?

• 50+ Full color character and monster tokens
• 3 sheets of double sided Dungeon Tiles
• 16-page 4th edition quick start rules (uh-oh)
• 64-page Dungeons Masters book
• 6 dice (!)

for $16.99.

Ok, price is GOOD. It’s not GREAT, but it is good. It feels like it’s trying to be a loss leader at a slightly too-high price to pull it off. I might have seen what I could have done for $2 less. Sounds meaningless in the greater scheme of things, but it’s even easier for a kid to talk his parent into it at $14.99. The tiles are fine, but kinda blah. I know “wow” factors might not be the best idea for terrain features in an intro game, but again, something I might have done to get people excited enough to try the box out. The tokens have some appeal, and I might go so far as to say I wouldn’t mind seeing these expanded and sold as a product by themselves. (Yes, yes, I know you can make tokens…but I don’t much find time to make anything nowadays. Build it, and they will come…) The dice are vanilla dice. Maybe in the meh category…but, hey they will get you there.

Now, here is where we get to the meat of the thing. The player QSRs and the Dungeon Masters Book. This is where we start to get more conflicted. At 16 pages, I have to say I am massively disappointed in the player QSR. It’s really no better than the QSR you find in “Keep on the Shadowfell.” In fact, I don’t have it in front of me, but it sure doesn’t seem that different at all. Having played the game now a few times and run it an equal amount of times, I am pretty certain this is enough to gve you an ever so slight taste of the game, but I am not sure if it’s enough to make you wanna keep playing. In some ways, when 4th edition flip-floped the “priorities” in the DMG and PHB from the way they handled 3.5, a lotta meat of the game went squarely into the players’ hands. This 16-page slice of ham just isn’t enough of a meal. I think I am conflicted because, while it is enough to get started, it could have been a lot more.

The DM’s book is a lot better. It has enough rules to get a DM running, a nice little adventure, and a slice of the Monster Manual all in a nice 64-page book. It also might be trying to do more than it really can in 64 pages, but it feels like it steps the new DM through the process better than the players’ QSR steps the new player through. Perhaps my reaction to both of these books is from just how good of a job the core hardcovers do in explaining what D&D is to the uninitiated. I have been into RPGs since the 3rd grade, and the 4th edition DMG and PHB do the best job I have ever seen of explaining how to roleplay I have ever read in a commercial product. I mean, heck, the chapter on the social aspects of gaming in the DMG alone is worth it’s weight in gold. I guess I am just a little disappointed at how far this box didn’t go in those terms. Maybe it is good enough, and maybe it isn’t. But, as I do every year, at least a handful will go in this years Salvation Army Toy bin with the hope that it is indeed enough for a new start.

Oh, one final mention about the box. It’s going to be impossible to use to store the stuff in it once that same stuff is punched. It may be an insta-toss. Foo.

I’m running a lunchtime game of 4e at my law firm. (That’s right, a party comprised entirely of lawyers!) I’m running a conversion of the legendary Queen of the Spiders megadventure. I’m starting them out at 11th level. Among the first issues I noticed was dealing with a party of 4 PCs rather than the recommended 5-PC paradigm. There is something of a hole in the Dungeon Master’s Guide when it comes to a 4-PC party. The DMG gives a lot of advice on dealing with parties of less than four or more than six, and all of the relevant tables offer parameters for 4-PC and 6-PC parties (such as the “Target Encounter XP Totals” table in the “Encounter Components” section). Generally, much attention is paid to crafting combat encounters for 4-PC parties. However, assuming each of the four roles is covered, there is still one glaring omission when it comes to the 4-PC party: skill checks.

There are seventeen skills. Each class has training in a handful of skills, from the fighter’s lowly three to the rogue’s six. Most classes are trained in four skills. We must start with the premise that training, with its +5 bonus, is critical to reliably succeeding on a given skill check. Indeed, one of the underlying premises in adventure design is that there will always be at least one character in the party skilled enough to have a reliable chance of succeeding on any given skill check. With four PCs, it is possible to craft a party that has training in each skill. However, unless skill coverage is the point of decision, it is highly unlikely that a 4-PC party will have training in all skills. (Conversely, it is very unlikely that a 5-PC party will be untrained in any skill. Whether by design or fortune, the 5-PC party is definitely a sweet spot for skill coverage.)

In my QotS game, we have a cleric, paladin, ranger, and wizard. You’ll note, right away, the difficulty with the cleric/paladin dyad. Although those two classes cover two different roles, they have a remarkably similar skill list. The striker role is inherently problematic. There are six skills that are only covered by two classes (Acrobatics, Bluff, Nature, Perception, Stealth, and Thievery), and each of them is covered, at least in part, by a class of the striker role. If your striker is a ranger, that means Bluff and Thievery are uncovered; if your striker is a warlock, Acrobatics, Perception, and Stealth are uncovered. (You’ll note that this problem exists even in 5-PC parties.)

Certainly, this is not a critical problem. Skill check DCs can be fudged as necessary. Of course, verisimilitude is damaged if the PCs, for example, only encounter trivially pickable locks and laughably disabled traps. Or, worse, you could eschew certain encounter types altogether, to the boredom of all. So, what to do?

The solution I came up with for my QotS game comes in the form of a minor artifact, The Crimson Bell. The advantage of this solution is that it resolves the mechanical issue in the simplest way possible, essentially teleporting the missing fifth PC in for a skill check and teleporting him back out just as quickly. You’ll note that I omitted concordance altogether, which is justified on both mechanical and flavor grounds. Moreover, it provides color and flavor, grist for the role-playing mill. In the case of my QotS game, the Bell contains the imbued spirit of their fallen comrade, Menna the halfling rogue. She was slain by dark elves on a recon mission, her body left mutilated in the traditional manner, her eyes plucked from their sockets and clenched in her hands. Hmmm, how will the party react when the adventure turns to the devious machinations of Eclavdra and her ilk?

THE CRIMSON BELL
The Crimson Bell is appropriate for paragon-level characters.
The Crimson Bell      Paragon Level
In 205 CY, the Sheldomar Valley came under siege by an unending wave of creatures the likes of which had never been seen—weird and terrible monsters of an unknown sort. A dozen companies of human adventurer dared to explore the mysterious ruins that seemed to be the source of the scourge. None came back alive. In the end, it took a band of hardy heroes—one member from each of the “lesser” species: elf, eladrin, dwarf, dragonborn, and halfling—too end the threat. They took an artifact from the excursion as their symbol: a Crimson Bell with mysterious properties. In the following years, the Company of the Crimson Bell has become legend, their deeds sung in the laudatory odes of even human bards. The Company has passed down the titular artifact to a new version when they see cause to disband or, in the most dire circumstances, are destroyed.

When a new company is formed, each of the five members undertakes a rite of bonding, connecting their spirits to one another through the Crimson Bell. These heroes are attuned to the bell. Thereafter, if any of the five falls in combat, their spirit is imbued in the bell, and any of the company may commune with it for insight.

Wondrous Item

Property: You gain a +1 item bonus to History checks.

Property: You can speak and understand the primary language of the imbued spirit.

Property (Encounter • Arcane, Implement): Standard action. If the bell is rung, all characters attuned to it instantly know its exact location and the exact location of all other attuned characters within one mile.

Property (Encounter • Arcane, Implement): Minor action. You gain an item bonus to your next skill check equal to the skill bonus of the imbued spirit for that skill.

So, it’s worth saying that 4E has gotten me into playing with miniatures like never before. A confession: I was never a big fan of the minis. I think it had something to do with never being very good (or at least FEELING like I was very good) at the pure, tactical minis stuff. Too many times getting my head blown off with an Autocannon 20 while standing in water, or something.

But inject a little roleplaying into the mix, with the kind of entertaining dynamism the 4e powers-sets have, and I’m off to the races, it turns out. But sometimes I’m a little too much off to the races. The props that now come with my D&D experience contain a certain dark power that draw me in, and make me forget about the other things I should be doing.

This wizard I’ve read about talks about how knowing something’s name gives you power over it. So with that interest at heart, I am hereby going to name a couple of my “enemies”:

Mapnosis. I’ve talked about this on That’s How We Roll, and I still like it for its accuracy. Mapnosis is what happens when you put the map down on the table before you need it to be there. Watch what happens to the players’ attention spans once a map rolls out: it’s big, it’s interesting, it’s often chock-full of information about what’s coming ahead. For all of this and more, it’s distracting. Almost hypnotic. And that can be a dangerous thing for all of the play you’re looking to have before that map gets into the action.

The cure here is a simple one: avoid rolling out the map until absolutely necessary. If you’ve got a lot of Dungeon Tiles or the like you want to lay out in advance and aren’t looking to put the game on hold while you set it up, think about separating your map-play area from your roleplay area. Do the talky in the living room; do the fighty in the kitchen. Or if you’ve got a flip-mat map going on, buy yourself a cheap rectangle of plexiglas at Home Depot, put your map under that, and then put your books and snacks and stuff on top of it until it’s time to get to the minis action. It can make a world of difference for the roleplaying side of it all.

Mini-Mizing. This is a more recent thing I’ve noticed myself doing. When it’s time to get into the combat action, and I’m bringing the minis out, I often find myself letting the minis themselves do the talking. There’s a part of this that’s good—it’s nice to have something as illustrative as a painted (pre- or otherwise) mini to give a sense of what’s going on.

But the bad part, for me at least, comes in the form of letting that illustration do all the work.  I end up mini-mizing the description of things.  I let the descriptive elements of storytelling fall by the wayside, because I have something to lean on and allow a little laziness.  The zombies don’t colorfully drool ichor; the dialogue is minimal; the fanatic cultists don’t rush forward babbling, they move six squares and execute a charge attack.

I’ve got to get better about that.  Because, yeah, the maps and minis are fun, but if I’m not also working the storytelling angle, I’m not really doing all of my job as a DM.

What bad habits can you identify and give a name to?  And how will you conquer them?

So, the game I’m running at home is called In the Shadow of Giants, and is set in an urban environment, a city built by the giants (evil overlords, but at present so far above the PC’s heads that there’s no real interaction going on).  The players are playing members of the Watch, an attempt to ensure there’s a little law & order going on for the “lesser races” living in and among the giants’ towers in little ramshackle refugees’ towns (the rest of the world is having a small apocalypse, and the city — though run by evil beings — looks like the last safe place by comparison). This has given me an interesting opportunity to focus on a few things.

The first is fixed-location play (which sits at odds with the points of light paradigm but should feel familiar to Freeport fans). I’m not going to talk about that first thing yet, because the second is what’s exciting me more: it’s the fact that the PCs are responsible for people.  Not in a typical “we go out into the world and do adventurous things in the name of GOOD!” responsible sort of way.  I mean, they have other watchmen they might command, and a citizenry to keep happy and protected in a city that’s rife with organized crime and worse.  So with that in mind I want to talk a bit about the things I’ve done to bring the responsibility thing home for the players.

First and foremost, I’ve given them encounters taking place in populated places, where half of the encounter’s point is not to take down the bad guys but to keep the bystanders from getting hurt.  The game’s very first encounter took place in a crowded market, where a gang fight broke out.  The Watch was doing its best to stay out of the way of the gang war — but I’d placed a number of pennies on the map to represent the civilians.  Whenever a bad guy’s attack missed — someone got hit. I’d pick up the penny affected and drop it into a glass I had positioned prominently to one side of the map.  I called it “the casualty cup”.  The players got the point.

Interesting stuff came out of that.  The Healing skill became even more important as PCs not in the thick of it ran around tending to those wounded by the light show the criminal element was generating.  Our Paladin spent a couple turns frantically digging through the crushed remains of a stall to see if the folks trapped within had survived — and thankfully, with the Watch’s help, they did.  Our Rogue, perhaps most cynical of all about the matter, carefully herded folks away from the fight before it even started.  And several of our more Intimidating types used their skills as crowd control: I ruled that they could roll their Intimidate (or other appropriate) skill, and for every 5 points they got on the result, that increased the radius of their burst area by one.  Those civilians within the resulting burst fell under the player’s control for that turn, when they came round on the initiative order (basically, I said to the player: okay, these pennies? you control their move, up to six squares, when it’s the civilians’ turn).

It ended up adding a nice, dynamic element to the encounter that wasn’t just about hurling damage around the board, and it really brought the idea of “We are the Watch. We look out for people.” home.  (It worked well enough, in fact, that two sessions later I broke the trick out again — only this time with a rapidly-spreading fire and civilians trapped inside needing help.  It proved a nasty distraction when the Blazing Skeleton started hurling some pain around.)

But that’s not the only element of responsibility I’ve given the players over our first few sessions.  I’ve also sent them into fights with minions of their own.  It’s pretty simple to just stat up a standard minion of equivalent level to the PCs (I just go to the Monster Manual, take the basic attack, and strip off the special abilities, usually).  Then, I give each player a second minion-mini to control on the board.

The allied minions have proven nice in more than one way.  A little extra help flanking an opponent.  Someone to do a needful secondary task while the player’s real PC takes on the primary threat.  Gives the player just a little bit more to do during a long fight — especially nice when the main PC is pinned down somewhere and can’t get to the rest of the fight.  Just a little extra “realism” in that the good guys are actually losing people in a nasty fight. And as a DM, it’s given me a little extra padding on the PCs, allowing me to crank the encounter dial up just a little bit harder without as much worry of a TPK.  Those minion watchmen slow down the bad guys just enough.

At any rate, it’s a texture that I’ve really enjoyed having in my game.  Giving the PCs some in-character responsibility that they have to manage during an encounter can really change the experience from a straight-up slugfest into something richer.  I can’t recommend it enough.

As many of you know, I am one of the owners of EndGame in Oakland, Ca. Our store is very heavily driven upon an event based community model. We host a variety of different games on different nights, and these events tend to ebb and flow over time…with one exception: Dungeons and Dragons.

For the past five years we have hosted the RPGA on Monday nights. With very few exceptions, this hearty group of adventurers has met at the store without fail. It has been very interesting watching such a solid, committed group go through the switch from D&D 3.5 to 4e.

At the store, we get to see “version changes” often. Miniatures games like Warhammer 40,000 get new rules every few years. Board games even see revisions. But the grand pappy of RPGs throwing a change in the works is a pretty big deal…especially when it was as “ground-up” as 3.5 to 4e was.

Let’s backtrack for a moment and discuss the overall switch:as a single store we have sold over 125 copies of the PHB alone, and well into the hundreds of all the offical WoTC 4e products. It has been the largest success in terms of sales in our role-playing category that I have personally witnessed. The general acceptance of the new edition in our one retail location has been at least 6 to 1 on the positive side of those odds. At this point, I wouldn’t hesitate to call it a force of nature…

Now we get back to events. My most requested demo in the past 2 months has been 4e. The RPGA has been firing off four full tables of 4e each week, with one or two tables of 3.5 for those looking to finish off the mods before making the switch. Now we fast forward to the largest single event I have ever run at the store: A Weekend in the Realms.

WoTC has chosen to herald in the switch from Living Greyhawk to Living Forgotten Realms with a full weekend of D&D. We are rolling a little different, and hosting the games in a single day. Initially we had five tables lined up, with three time slots through the day. 15 games of anything is quite the feat.

Those games filled up in just a few short days.

Then we added a sixith table, and finally a seventh. Twenty-one games of 4e in a single day, at a single store. I mean, damn.

To make a long story short, 4e hit the ground running at EndGame. We had some fear, and some of our customers certainly had some doubt…but that is long past us now.

One store, one day, 21 games. Long Live 4e!

Working on 4e stuff is an ongoing process of discovery. The game has a lot of moving parts, many of which are not immediately evident. For purposes of play, this is a fantastic thing, and it contributes a lot to the sense that the game “just works.” Unfortunately, it also means that if you sit down and start writing your own material, there are a lot of potential pitfalls. Worse, if you’ve got a lot of third edition in your brain, there are a lot of assumptions that are going make trouble for you.

Here are a few tidbits that I’ve come across (or stumbled over) as I’ve been working on the Witch Doctor. It’s far from comprehensive, but it’s a good start.

• It is critically important to remember that “Effect” in a power always goes off. A lot of daily powers which do not have a “Miss” entry still have an effect, so it’s not wasted on a miss. In short, if you want something to happen whether you hit or miss, make it an effect.
  
• Stance and Reliable are intensely powerful and useful keywords, and they create a number of rules for a power so it’s important to get comfortable with them.
  
• It is easy to confuse attack types and keywords because they’re used similarly, but so long as you remember that melee, ranged, close, area and personal are attack types, then you’re probably ok.
  
• Some bonuses stack. Specifically, feat, racial and untyped bonuses stack. The feat ones are the ones that really matter because there are a few existing feats (like Improved Initiative and Quick Draw or Dwarven Weapon Training and Weapon Focus) that already do this. Obviously, too many stacked bonuses can be a problem, so these are the categories you need to look for.
  Nope. That was me reading certain sidebars wrong.
  
• As a curious addendum, I originally missed that the bonus you get from magic items is not an item bonus but rather an enhancement bonus. Yes, obvious once you realize it, but it left my totally scratching my head the first time I saw a magical suit of armor that had an item bonus among its properties. It’s all laid out explicitly in a sidebar in chapter 9, but I think I just glazed over it.
  
• Anytime you see an effect with ongoing damage, remember that it will almost always fire off at least once, and adjust your impression of its damage appropriately. This is why cloud of daggers uses a relatively low die value.
  
• There is no such thing as a to hit bonus. That is now a bonus to an attack. This is a small thing, but man, the to hit bonus is a hard habit to break.
  
• ‘Wall’ just describes a shape, it does not suggest duration. Notably, a solid wall is an explicit type of wall.
  
• I still have no idea why there’s no ‘Bolt’ or ‘Ray’ area type. You can fake it by saying a wall which can’t change direction, but that’s kind of a pain.
  
• Races that have stat pairs within the same defense category (Strength & Constitution, Dexterity & Intelligence or Charisma & Wisdom) can often seem very potent (Warforged and Eladrin being great examples) but the hit they take to their defenses can be a real problem.
  
• Some feats are just better than others. Dwarven Weapon Training is just better than weapon focus, and that’s ok. This is partly because it’s a more specialized sort of feat, but more because it supports the fiction. Dwarves should be using axes and hammers, so the rules reinforce that by making it a better choice.
  

There’s more, of course, but a lot of it is even more fiddly - matters of layout, style and much more, but I’ll be here all night if we start getting into that. We’re already on version 4 of our internal style guide, and it’s GROWING.