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In this first set of poison pages from One Bad Egg’s Poisoncraft Fourth Edition line, you’ll find a set of monsters bound to make your upper paragon-tier players quake as they reach for the anti-venom. You’ll also find a fully detailed combat encounter, with a full overhead map of the Poisonworks from SkeletonKey Games. Also packed in is a new poison, a rakshasa predator, and a refinery that’s ready to blow!

Poisoncraft 4E: The Syrallax is priced at $1.99 and goes on sale January 19th.

• Release date: January 19th 2009
• One Bad Egg Bookshelf beta users get early access. Sign up for an account today!
• Available at Indie Press Revolution
• And RPGNow
• also get the bundle with the maps, from Skeleton Key Games!
• And Paizo! (soon!)

Hold Person                                                   Cleric Attack 13
You rebuke your enemy with the ominous tidings of your deity, freezing them in place.
Encounter * Divine, Implement
Standard Action                    Ranged 10
Target: One creature
Attack: Wisdom vs. Will
Hit: The target is helpless, immobilized, and cannot use powers with the weapon or implement keyword (save ends all).

Races in Dungeons & Dragons 4E are good for laying down the broad strokes of a character, but they often don’t feel as “lived in” as the ethnicities we encounter in everyday life. One potent reason for this is a general lack of cultural complexity and diversity. D&D races tend to be presented as monocultural societies—all elves are the same the world over, and so on.

Hard Boiled™ Cultures aims to make it easy to change that, outlining versatile, easy methods for diversifying the ideas of culture and race in your D&D 4E game. Better yet, the methods break down how to give this diversity real weight in the system, rather than simply relying on “color” text to do the job. Fred Hicks and Jonathan Walton show you how to reverse-engineer cultural cues out of an existing race writeup, and then create nigh-limitless possibilities for other cultures within that race once the building blocks are made plain.

Inside this 17-page PDF you’ll find clear, well-documented methods for culture building, a culture building worksheet, tribes of elves, apelord intellectuals, and a dark faerie spin on dwarves. Your campaign worlds will never be the same again!

Hard Boiled™ Cultures for 4E is priced at $3.99 and goes on sale January 12th.

• Release date: January 12th 2009
• One Bad Egg Bookshelf beta users get early access. Sign up for an account today!
• Available at Indie Press Revolution
• And RPGNow
• And Paizo!

D’artagnan is clearly the striker, and Porthos is obviously the defender. I can’t make up my mind about Athos and Aramis, though, since I can make a good case for either one being a leader or controller. I think I settle on Athos as Leader and Aramis as controller, but I could probably be convinced otherwise.

All of which is to say, swashbuckling is on my mind. Thinking about urban play for my Gloomwrought game has bled a little bit into it, and what it would take to capture that flavor in 4e.

I consider swashbuckling to be an oddity in D&D history, particularly since I think it has never been as well supported as it was in second edition. With setting material like a Mighty Fortress and Red Steel combined with what was my favorite application of the kit system – making a swashbuckler kit available to all classes – it was a really good time to be swinging a rapier. In contrast, 3e fell short. Sure, there were swashbuckler classes, but I never saw the product that made me think “ah, yes, I can see doing a campaign of this.”

4e starts off on slightly better footing than 3e, if only because combat encourages a lot more movement and noise (things I consider essential for swashbuckling) and it strongly encourages stunts. Plus, the rogue is almost a swashbuckler in design; he makes an excellent pirate, but a poor musketeer. However, it’s definitely not entirely there yet. 4e’s flavor and style owes something to swashbuckling, but it is a horse of a different color, and that in turn leads to my thinking about what it would take to make the transition.

The biggest question for me is really about the map – for all that it has promoted a certain amount of dynamism in fight scenes, mapnosis and setup are both somewhat calcifying. Someday when I have the time, I really want to go through the various powers and think about which ones are still fun without the map.
Handling things like range, sneak attacks and proximity was never a problem pre-minis so a lot of powers can translate easily, but there are some real gotchas. I suspect that the warlord would really end up getting gutted.

If there’s enough to work with, it would be easier to work with the existing classes than to have ot make new ones from scratch. It’s a bit limited, since I’d probably want to stick to the martial power source, which is a a problem with controllers, but the martial controller is one of those ideas that is starting to bubble through to the surface in enough places that I suspect its addressable. Far easier to tweak the classes.

For example, consider the Duelist, a Rogue mod. It’s basically the rogue, but with two changes:
1) Sneak Attack is renamed “Fair Fight” and it grants a bonus to damage under the following circumstances:
* In melee
* The duelist has no allies adjacent to the target
* No one else has attacked the target sicne the end of the duellist’s last turn
* The duelist does not have combat advantage against the target

2) Gains the class ability “Gentleman’s deferral” which is an encounter ability, standard action. When you have combat advantage against an opponent, you can choose not to attack him, and take a second wind action (which does not count as your usual 1 second wind per turn).

Yes, there are some minor tweaks that such a change demands – some feats need tweaking or duplicating, some powers may not quite work. It’s not finely balanced – it’s possible it would be better off with ranger/warlock extra damage. But this sort of thing is easy to rapidly prototype and try out in your own game if you’re just looking to scratch an itch.

Now, I know that a lot of this is technically an arena where paragon paths are supposed to be the tool to use, but I just don’t buy it. I like paragon paths mechanically, and some of them even have nice color, but I really have not yet felt like they are interesting enough that anyone would use them if they weren’t mandatory. Hacking paragon paths is certainly cleaner, but while it’s full of dangers, Martial Power gave us some good illustrations of why there’s a lot more mileage to be gotten out of hacking the core class.

All of which comes back to the four musketeers. Excepting Aramis, it’s not hard to come up with a similar hack for each of them (and Aramis will hopefully be covered in time). Mix in a little hack to improve everyone’s light armor AC and you now have most of the makings of a game of game of rooftops and rapiers. There are still some rough bits (*cough*magicitems*cough*) but to me it feels like a lot of distance can be covered in only a few steps.

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.