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