The Codex Venenorum is done. Whew! I’m sure it will come as no surprise that I’ve always had a special place in my heart for Poisoncraft, which was the first product I ever published, way back in 2004.

Retooling the book for 4e was incredibly challenging, but I’m happy to say it was also extremely rewarding. It opened my eyes to some of the subtler design elements of the new system. In short, I think the process of creating the new book made me a better designer. This caused something of a chain reaction. While I was creating all of the poisons that form the meat of the Codex, I kept coming up with new ideas and new ways of handling things. And, of course, I had 30 levels to play with now, instead of just 20. In the end, I came up with 81 poisons for the Codex, and I’ve only scratched the surface of what these new playthings can do.

I thought I would post a few peeks here for those on the fence. For starters, I’ll show you one of the new poisons, First Strike:

You can see, I tweaked the format a little. For starters, I wanted to add a little more fluff for each poison, using an “implied setting”, written in the voice of Nylson Veld himself. This went a long way in keeping a raft of poison entries from becoming eye-meltingly boring. You’ll also note the dual entry for the component cost. This is for the two versions WotC displayed in the DMG and AV, i.e., persistent and transient, i.e., one-encounter and one-shot. Finally, the poison shows some of the unique directions I took in exploring properties and effects. Here, we have an interesting property that offers strategic challenges and a non-standard remedy (the condition that ends an ongoing effect) that shows off some of what the new Codex is all about.

The product itself includes a handy index of all 81 poisons in separate, sortable Excel and CSV formats. This index includes all of the information necessary to actually use the poison in your game, including the attack bonus and effects. If you want a taste of what the book contains (poor choice of words I know), you can download the Excel spreadsheet and a pdf of the index sorted by level right now.

Finally, I thought I would give a teaser about material I am working on for upcoming Poisoncraft products, specifically the Player Options and DM Options books. They’ll see a return of all the fan favorites from the original Poisoncraft, including the sennith PC race, toxifying magic weapons, and the dreaded toxic deathlords. I’ll be recasting all of the prestige class abilities and spells to suit the new 4e power structure. So get ready for the wall of wasps and the toxomancer paragon path. And I’ll be presenting a slew of skill challenges, encounters, and side treks for DMs to throw at their players. Of course, I’m looking forward to diving in.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about the new Codex, what you are doing with it, and how it’s going down in your game.

The Codex Venenorum — a venomous tome of poisoncraft from the quill of master poisoncrafter Nylson Veld — comes for you on Monday.  Containing detailed poison creation rules and over eighty sample poisons for use at any level (from the vile hopemelter to the subtle blue deception), the Codex is a necessity for anyone looking to deal a hated enemy a poisonous blow.

But don’t ask us about the Codex… Ask one of the recipients of our draughts what he thinks about that.

… Oh, dearie me. The cat quite seems to have his tongue.  You’ll have to take our word for it after all.

(One Bad Egg Bookshelf users may wish to drop on by to get their draughts of Poisoncraft early … avoid the rush, and get there before your rivals do. It’s the prudent thing.)

“Hardboiled Cultures is an extremely good supplement. It gives players tools for creating diversity within the heavily stereotyped D&D player races, and then rooting them in the games systems in a logical fashion. While it is quite possible to add cultural variety to races without these tools, the mechanical tweaks Hardboiled Culture guides you through give a little extra weight to these changes, fighting the impulse to fall back on cliché. While Hardboiled Cultures does not provide a complete guide, it is useful to players that want help balancing their own original creations. Finally, if you look past the specific implementation for Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, it can even be applied easily to many other fantasy, science fiction and horror roleplaying games. There is a lot to chew on in this small package. I highly recommend it.”

Full review here.

Quoth WotC:

This month, we kick off a new rollout of exclusive material for the Dungeons & Dragons game that you can only get as a D&D Insider subscriber. This exclusive material won’t appear in any core rulebooks or supplements, but it will be totally official and ready to use if you’re a D&D Insider subscriber. We start out with the revenant, a new player character race that I predict is going to be all the rage. The revenant is an undead creature who could have been of any other race in life but returns after death as a revenant with a new life and a new purpose. With a connection to the Raven Queen, vague memories of past lives, and some cool undead powers, the revenant provides great opportunities for roleplaying and new approaches to character death — because for the revenant, death is only the beginning! Look for the revenant player character race on June 15, exclusively available to D&D Insiders.

Where have I seen that idea before? Hmmm…

Up until June 15th, you can get the Half-Dead PC race from One Bad Egg at RPGNow for only 99 cents (but you’ll have to follow this super-duper secret link):

http://www.rpgnow.com/index.php?discount=29630

Poisoncraft: Codex Venenorum is done and waiting for a trip through the Fred Hicks Prettification Machine. So I thought I would unwind with another 3e conversion. This is one of my favorites from the last edition:

Feeblemind power

I like this conversion for a few reasons. It gives the wizard another long-distance power, which is quickly becoming the last defining feature of the class. It has a pretty novel suite of damage effects. (I particularly like the penalty to Reflex defense, which seems odd at first blush but, in fact, makes perfect sense.) Finally, I like the conditional penalty to the saving throw, which is a fruitful area for further design exploration.

Just one problem….

Did you figure it out….

I didn’t notice until I started typing this post….

That’s right. Monsters don’t have the arcane keyword. So that last sentence is essentially useless. Sigh.

This points out an interesting design phenomenon for me. When I’m designing for 4e, I don’t have much trouble getting into the 4e mindset. For some reason, when I’m designing conversions from 3e to 4e, I seem to have these kind of niggling issues pop up. In fact, I had some similar issues crop up while I was working on the Poisoncraft conversion. I would find myself doing a straight conversion of something and catch myself in time to realize that it might be something that doesn’t belong in 4e at all. For Poisoncraft, I think this ended up making it a much better product because I found myself really focusing on the design issues, giving them greater scrutiny. Anyone else have similar experiences?

On the upside, there are a couple of easy fixes. You could just swap psychic for arcane. In some ways, this is a better fit than arcane anyway (though it lacks the traditional tie to its 3e progenitor). You could repurpose it to a monster power easily enough, perhaps for an evil mage NPC. What would you do?

My home game is set in a city built by (and actively ruled by) giants. Looking ahead to an eventual transition into Paragon tier, I’m thinking it’d be a natural time to let folks take on new characters if they want. Combined with my setting, it makes me wonder — should it be possible to play (relatively small) giants, say on the Hill Giant scale? Which expands, in general, to the question of: is it possible to have a Large player race, or is that simply a nonstarter in 4e?

Let’s break it down. What does Large get you, just by itself?

“Neutral” elements:

• You take up a 2×2 area instead of a 1×1

Benefits:

• You’d probably get Reach:2 with your melee attacks (your threatening reach would only be 1 square out, though — so no Reach 2 opportunity attacks — but since the “ring” of squares around a 2×2 creature is 4×4, not 3×3, you would be threatening more squares due to having more adjacent squares).
• You should be using one-size-boosted weapons — which would increase the die size of any weapon you use, as per PHB page 220. This essentially amounts to “+1 damage with all melee weapons”.
• Also as per PHB 220, you’d be able to use two-handed weapons of Medium size class in one hand, but you simply can’t use one-handed weapons of Medium size because they’re too damn small.
• Your “Close Burst” powers essentially cover a greater area (at least the way I imagine them working — though you could patch this by saying you have to choose one of your four occupied squares as the square of origin, which would mean that a close burst 1 would be partially swallowed by your occupied squares).
• You can’t be Bull Rushed by Small or smaller creatures — so halflings and other Small races wouldn’t have that tactical option against you. Flip that around, and it would mean that you *can* bull rush something that’s Huge!
• For your allies, you’ll be providing greater cover (allies provide cover to one another), but little obstruction (see below).  For your enemies, you’ll be a formidable obstacle, able to singlehandedly block a 10-foot-wide hallway (they just won’t be able to move through you) — and with your opportunity attacks going one square out to either side, you could “cover” a 20-foot-wide opening (a Medium sized creature would cover 15 feet, so this is just a 1 square gain).

Downsides:

• Fitting into places is tough, but at Large, it’s not impossible. See PHB 292; the Squeeze action is the key. You can still fit into that room that’s less than 2 squares high or through that doorway that’s only 1 square wide — but you’ll move only half your speed, take a -5 penalty to attack rolls, grant combat advantage, and provoke opportunity attacks when you do so. Those are some significant downsides, but so long as you’re not getting regularly hosed by it, it’s managable — most often, you’ll
• It would be harder to gain superior cover. It just plain takes something larger to give you superior cover — if it doesn’t span at least two squares (horizontally and vertically, I would imagine), it can’t provide it.
• The enemy can mob you more effectively.  There are 16 squares instead of 9 they could use to surround you, and from opposing “flat sides” to the 2×2 square you occupy, being in either of the two squares on each side yields flanking.
• Minor hassle: because you take up 4 squares instead of 1, 2 across at any point, while your allies can move through your squares at no penalty, they can’t stop in those squares, so getting past or behind you will take just a little extra work on occasion.
• If you’re in a game that tracks gold usage, larger weapons and items should just plain cost more.

Looking at all of this, factoring in the downsides, I’d say being Large is at least as awesome as having Dragon Breath.  Using my rule of feat-equivalence in Hard Boiled Cultures, Dragon Breath brings several benefits to the table: it allows an attack as a minor action, and it affects an area, making it the equivalent of three feats.

Here, we’re seeing: Reach 2 on melee. That’s at least one tick-mark.  The +1 average damage due to an upsized weapon is really one side of the same coin as being able to wield a medium two-handed weapon in one hand.  Call those another tick-mark.  The other benefits of being greater in size get another 1-2 tick-marks.  So all in all, I’d rate being Large as being the equal of at least 4 feats — one more than dragon breath.

The Dragonborn are an interesting baseline to compare this “PC Giant” to, then.  They have the standard 6 speed, 2 languages, +2 to 2 traits (Strength and Charisma would make a good pairing for a Giant PC, too), 6 speed, +2 to 2 skills (for a giant, I’d probably go +2 Intimidate, +2 Endurance), and two racial benefits beyond their dragon breath.

Swap out for a Giant PC, and you’d have only 1 racial benefit beyond that core if I’m correct in valuing Being Large as being 1 feat-equivalent more than dragon breath.  My short-list for that one remaining racial benefit is either a Speed of 7 (greater stride — and certainly appropriate, given that the Monster Manual’s hill giants have a speed of 8), a boost to Fortitude defense (+2, perhaps), or the equivalent of the Toughness feat (more size equals more HP).

Have I missed anything in my assessment here? Is “4 benefits” the correct valuation for Being Large, given the downsides?  Is playing a Large PC viable at all, for your games & experience?

Talk to me.

Reality Deviant and One Bad Egg have teamed up to offer a new product bundle at RPGNow! In Scarrport, the touch of the Umbral Claw is never too far away… Get Gods of the Shroud and Scarrport: City of Secrets for $4 off the current total.

This is a part of our Open Gods Initiative, and we couldn’t be more pleased.

Something has disturbed the old tombs.  Something colorful.

The Menace is Revealed

In light of the recent news from a certain cabal of Wizards, One Bad Egg is (as usual) heading in the opposite direction, with an Everything Must Stay! sales event.  For the rest of the month of April, everything in our store is at least 10% off!

http://www.rpgnow.com/index.php?manufacturers_id=2482&affiliate_id=231162

If you prefer to do your shopping elsewhere (such as at IPR or on our OBE Bookshelf, please explore your options at our website's store page:

http://www.onebadegg.com/store/

We love our PDF customers, and appreciate your support — always.

Best,

The One Bad Eggheads

(Orc and Pie is used with Monte Cook’s permission, but he has absolutely nothing to do with this.)

Somewhat fannish post, but I’m really excited to try playing an avenger from the PHB2 sometime.   It’s a weird class, and maybe it’ll be less interesting in practice than it seems in theory, but I’m totally willing to find out.  For all that PHB2 introduced some welcome additions the the controller stable, I’m most intrigued by what they did with strikers. None of the strikers in the PHB2 have the same kind of brute-force damage adders that the PHB1 classes do, and that makes the comparison between them kind of interesting.   It makes the PHB2 strikers seem less potent at first glance,  but since the guys at WOTC are no dummies, that just suggests that there are a few more subtleties at work.

At first glance, my impression was that the avenger traded off damage for a little bit of controller-ness, and while there’s some element of that it doesn’t entirely hold up.  There are some controller elements, certainly, but what the avenger really excels at is getting to his target, wherever they are on the board. Now, this absolutely makes him the bane of a certain type of enemy. Artillery, lurkers, controllers and skirmishers are all begging for trouble facing this class,  and those enemies tend to be a little bit less tough so the reduction in damage might correlate to that.  But that seemed a little bit too narrow in scope, and at least partly ignores the fact that the avenger is also going to have an interesting role when he tag-teams with a fighter or other potent marker (the avenger/swordmage synergy is just wacky enough that it might be awesome).

It finally came to me when the character builder came online and I started using it to make avengers (Githzerai and Shadar Kai avengers are kind of delicious for both stats and theme). Before the character builder, I hadn’t thought much about equipment, but  since the software makes it pretty easy, I had a bit of a realization as I was choosing weapons.  First, the avenger does not need an accurate weapon – his class ability means he rolls twice on attacks, and that’s a big enough accuracy boost that he can afford to take a weapon with a lower proficiency bonus.   So given that I started just looking for the weapon with the most raw damage, and that’s when it struck me that the avenger is twice as likely to score a critical hit against his target.

It’s obvious in retrospect, and I can’t believe I didn’t grasp it immediately, but the avenger is going to crit more reliably than any other class, so high damage weapons with high crit, like the heavy war pick, are going to pay off very well for him.  This dovetails nicely with the fact that he’s set up to take a fair number of opportunity attacks  (and avoid them) and with his likelihood to crit, even his basic attacks carry a lot of damage potential.

All of this has also been assuming a melee build.  On some level, I’m very curious to see what a range-build avenger ends up looking like.   It may or may not be viable, but I totally intend to experiment.  Similarly, I’m curious to see how the avenger abilities interact with a reach weapon (it definitely muddles at least one of their at-wills).

Now, I’m not 100% smitten.   I’m not sure why they don’t start with proficiency in leather armor – it seems somewhat essential on the face of it. Even with their inherent AC bonus, an avenger is likely to be in an exposed position a lot, and the small bump in AC from leather is a big deal. It seems like the avenger is obliged to burn a feat on it, and I always look at obligatory feats and wonder why they’re not just class features.

The avenger also suffers from the fact that he’ll probably have a lame strength, so his basic melee attack will such, which is problematic given the importance of charging and opportunity attacks.  The new martial feat can address that, but that’s one more feat the class has to take.  This is pretty bad, though not as bad as it could be, since the class makes up for the accuracy loss with its core ability.

It is also a shame that avengers don’t start with at least one additional weapon proficiency. It would be great if they started with superior weapon, if only because I want avengers to be the guys using the really weird weapons.  I suspect that were I to use them in a game, I would probably offer religion-based feats that grant leather armor proficiency and proficiency in one wacky weapon (so Avengers of the Raven Queen might get Spiked Chain, to reflect the Shadar-Kai influence).

Maybe it’s just the striker curse that they’re hungry for feats. I certainly know that rogues are, and rangers can be.  It’s possible it’s more feature than bug, but I’m skeptical.

Anyway, I’m still kicking the class around and I’m absolutely jonesing to see it at the table (that and the Warden).  Until I get the chance to do so I’ll probably keep rolling them up in the interest of seeing what it produces.  Maybe my current assessment will prove entirely off base.

Chad Underkoffler, who plays the Witch Doctor in my local D&D game, posted some thoughts about our Saturday session on his livejournal. In particular he’s curious to hear from other folks about their playing experiences…

Hard Boiled Armies is up on the One Bad Egg store page. If you’ve been curious for the details about what’s inside this latest hatchling, read on!

Looking to fast-foward to the Paragon tier? Here’s a free 11th-level download: Ratha Twice-Slain, Half-Dead Witch Doctor of the Wild!

Grab it at RPGNow

So, my buddy Chad is playing the Dragonborn Witch Doctor named “Zargon” in our local game, set in a “Babylon 5″ style city built by giants as a safe haven for ALL comers against the apocalypse that’s descended upon the world at large (but enough about that — this is about Chad).

Chad’s not really a “native” D&D player, and doesn’t soak in system esoterica like a number of us do, so Rob and I have been taking to creating a sort of “managed character sheet” experience for Chad, statting things up and providing him all the powers details he needs to make a go of it. Zargon recently made level 6, and the Witch Doctor got released, so I’ve been working on the update for his character today. Towards the end, after listing out his item, race, and class powers, I realized that — as a player — I’d probably get a lot of use out of a short summary of what I can do for each *type* of action in the game. So I wrote one up for Zargon, to give Chad a quick and easy way (that doesn’t depend on an internalization of the mechanics) to say “Okay, I’ve got a minor action left this turn — what are my options?”

Here’s Zargon’s action index:

FREE ACTIONS
* Activate Burning Gauntlets (Daily Item)
IMMEDIATE INTERRUPTS
* Encounter Powers: Evil Eye
IMMEDIATE REACTIONS
* Use Razor Shield (Daily Item)
* Use Repulsion Leather (Once Activated)
* Encounter Powers: Taste of Mojo
MINOR ACTIONS
* Activate Cloak of Resistance (Daily Item)
* Activate Repulsion Leather (Daily Item)
* Encounter Powers: Dragon’s Breath
* SUSTAIN: Rolling Boulder
MOVE ACTIONS
* Daily Powers: Repel Earth
* Move your Rolling Boulder
STANDARD ACTIONS
* At-Will Powers: Swarm of Fire, Tremor Strike
* Encounter Powers: Earth’s Fist, Spirit’s Pursuit
* Daily Powers: Rolling Boulder, Spirit Cascade
* Make another Rolling Boulder attack.

I’m figuring this might actually make for good play streamlining even for experienced players. Is anyone else out there doing something like this? (I know, with power cards a lot of this could simply be handled via a sorting/ordering method for your cards, though that does break down a bit when you have powers that take one action type to activate, but then another to sustain or make use of some other ongoing benefit.)

Those of you following my livejournal may already know about this, but our next product release will be Hard Boiled Armies. We’ll be releasing it sometime this coming Monday, but folks who register for the One Bad Egg bookshelf or who are already bookshelf members can buy an early-release copy.

This one’s a real doozy — clocking in at 30+ pages, including 9 pages of map tiles for an encounter involving the military defense of a city under attack. Check it out!

I was reading this thread at EN World, and there was some mention of “flavor/optimization mismatch”. In particular, they were talking about how the deva was optimally suited for orb wizard, which didn’t match the flavor of the race at all.

I also thought about this some when I was creating my new witch doctor character. I was trying to find an optimal race for a Mask of the Elements doc. Unfortunately, a few of the obvious choices were verboten for campaign purposes: dwarf, half-elf, and human. Fortunately, I stumbled across the gnome possibliity, which I was pretty stoked about, but I would have really been at a loss if I hadn’t.

So I did some more thinking … which is usually when I get into trouble.

This whole phenomenon seems to me to be an issue, not of mechanics, but of mindset–a holdover from 3e. You will recall that, in 3e, not all abilities were created equal. The physical stats were supreme, of course. Wisdom, modestly iimportant due to its impact on the Will save. Intelligence and Charisma were third-class citizens. Consequently, you could not simply swap out one ability score for another; the varying importance of them was used as a balancing factor. Nowhere was this more true than with the character races. This mechanical impact is compounded by the presence of aiblity score penalties. Half-orces received a +2 bonus to Strength and a -2 penalty to Intelligence and Charisma.

Enter Fourth Edition, which has an entirely different design paradigm. Every ability score is designed to be of relatively equal importance. (See, for example, how defenses are calculated; sub-optimal defenses issues–such as classes that require two abilities that impact the same defense–are handled through class features.) One race is not stronger or better than another simply on the force of which ability scores it grants a bonus to. Consequently, there is no mechanical impact to swapping one ability bonus for another. I do recognize that thematically this steps on the toes of the human. That consideration might not be trivial depending on your particular game and campaign.

Proposition: You can freely swap a character race’s ability score bonsues for any two abilities without damaging mechanical balance. Discuss.

N.B. – This discussion is particularly interesting and relevant in light of Hard-Boiled Cultures. HBC touched on this issue, but not in this context. A halfling with a bonus in Constitution and Charisma? Hmmm….

An icon update from yesterday’s Gray Icons effort…

Left to right: At-Will, Encounter, Daily, Item, Monster, Poison, Hazard.

We’ve made it onto RPGCountdown a second time, in the March 11 episode. Listen to Rob Donoghue comment on the design of the Witch Doctor as we clock in at #9: http://rpgcountdown.com/

While we still have an adventure series in the works for the Shroud, as well as one or two other products in mind, we’re getting close to feeling like we can wrap up that particular worldseed. Everything we’ve done so far except for the adventure series, in fact, would work pretty well all bundled up as a print-on-demand collection from Lulu — something we’ve had as a plan on our radar for a while.

Problem is, 4E’s layout — which we’ve been following closely in our own products — is strongly color-driven, in terms of color conveying meaning.  Olive means monster.  Gold means item.  And green, maroon, and dark grey are your at-will, encounter, and daily powers.

It’s those latter bits that are particularly troublesome when moving into print on demand.  Sure, we could do a color print on demand product, but color POD tends to be gigantically expensive — we’d have to set a price-point much higher than other comparable color interior books with the same kind of page count.  So that means we need to consider how to translate our material over into a greyscale presentation.

Monsters and items aren’t really a problem, when it comes down to it — their context tends to be pretty obvious when they show up somewhere.  The real trouble comes with those powers, where you could have a bunch of them in succession, without it being immediately obvious (unless you’re very good at scanning the blocks for a particular keyword) what class of power it is you’re looking at.

Some of those doing third party 4E support have chosen to confront this issue in different ways.  Goodman Games, at least as far as I’ve seen, opts to ignore the concern, while Mongoose has established a trio of icons in the power headers.  These icons are a sequence of “swirls”, progressing from many, smaller swirls for an at-will power, to just a pair of large swirls to signify a daily power.

Personally I favor visual shorthand over no shorthand, so the icon solution (or something similar) seems like the right way to go.  But without an official grayscale look coming out of WOTC, it’s up to us to invent the way we want to do it. Mongoose’s swirls definitely get some of it right, but overall theirs is not a visual language that really gels for me. Sure, I could consider something other than icons to do this job — grayscale powers entries could have different corner styles, borders, or shading — but speaking as the guy doing the layout work, I think all of those alternatives would work out to be some combination of “collossal pain in my ass” and “gaudy or otherwise visually muddled”.

So that leaves me thinking about icons (”dingbats”, if you prefer — the best approach would be to establish a font containing these designs).  And here, it’s best to think about a clear progression from at-will to daily — we’re talking trios of icons, not three icons living in isolation from one another.  The trick there is to figure out how to express the relationship among the three types of powers.  It could be measured by:

• Frequency – How often you get to use the power
• Magnitude – How “big” or “small” the power is relative to the other types
• Complexity – Daily powers might be represented as intricate, at-wills as simple
• Something else I’m not thinking of

So, here’s where Mongoose’s swirls get it right: they represent both frequency (number of swirls) and magnitude (size of each swirl).  So while the swirls don’t work for me as a final visual, they’re still working to express the relationship between power types in more than one way.  So it may simply be a matter of looking at finding the right geometric aesthetic to represent one power use (could be as simple as a diamond or star or circle).

One of the treatments I’ve done for this so far uses a “starburst” icon, stacking three small ones in a pyramid shape for at-will, two slightly larger ones in a column for encounter, and one fat one for a daily.  It works pretty well, but I’m not yet sold on it as the final idea.

That said, there’s nothing to suggest that we must hit more than one of that list for our visual language.  Another possible contender would be to simply focus on magnitude, and play around with moon-phases: crescent moon for an at-will, half-moon for an encounter, full moon for a daily.

What’s your preference for a visual, color-agnostic representation of these things?