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

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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!

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.