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.

Curious? Learn more about it at our Open Gods page!

So how do you get to the “zero” level of 4th edition?  How stripped down can you get?  Here’s my thoughts.  (And I’m curious — is it something you’d be interested in seeing expanded into an actual product? Or is this better left as a wee little blog post tossed out there on GM’s Day?)

When it comes down to it, I’m thinking about, in essence, negative levels — ones where a level 1 encounter will be a real challenge, and a single level 1 monster could take some real work.  The progression I’m thinking about would essentially be work as follows.  (The XP entry-points to each level are figured by working backwards along the “+250 XP per jump” lines of the PC positive level progression.  It takes 1000 XP to get to level 2, 1250 to get to level 3 — so it should take 750 to get to level 1, 500 to get to level 0, 250 to get to level -1.)

Note: Things COULD start at a Level -3 or lower if you want, but at that point you start stripping away even more essentials: no at-wills, no starting feat, etc.

Level -2 (-1500 XP)
You start out with your class features, 1 feat, and one at-will ability — no dailies, no encounters. Your level/2, rounded down, will also be at -1, which will make you just a bit more vulnerable and a bit less effective (lower defenses, lower chances to hit).

Concerns: Humans will still get the leg up here with a second at-will, but maybe that’s OK.  Any ability that provides area of effect will have some significant potency, so at the least, Wizards and Dragonborn will have some serious early mojo.  On the other hand, this is a pretty temporary level, since you’re looking at earning only 250 XP to get out of it, and having a little imbalance isn’t going to hang around for long.  Honestly, when you strip away a lot of the class abilities, it’s expected that the influence of racial powers will be more strongly felt.  And that one feat you start out with will be pretty influential.  It’s a texture I kind of like for this.

Level -1 (-1250 XP)
You gain your first encounter ability. -.5 rounds down to -1, so you’re still at a -1 on a number of things.

Level 0 (-750 XP)
You get your second at-will ability.  Your level/2 rounded down jumps to +0, so you start being more on par with your level 1 “final” form.

Level 1 (0 XP)
You gain your daily ability.  Congrats; you’ve made it to Level 1.

But that’s not the only thing that “scales”, here.  You’re also talking about altering what it takes to make a solid encounter.

In particular, the Target Encounter XP totals table expands to include the negative levels (which I’ve gotten at again by following the early positive level progressions backwards).

So here, you can see that a group of 4 Level -2 PCs with only one at-will ability apiece (plus class features, etc) would be at “par” with 4 minions, or a single level 1 monster.  I’m not sure if this math really bears out — this is a collection of Zero To Hero notes that haven’t seen any kind of playtest — but I *think* it still works out.  If I recall correctly, the idea is that it takes about 10 standard-level encounters to make it up to the next level.  At level -2, the standard same-level encounter reward would be 25 XP, and it takes 250 XP to get from level -2 to level -1, so the conceptual math there works out.  The idea of a pair or trio of level 1 monsters really making a group sweat has a certain perverse appeal to it as well.

So while I’m not sure if my balance notions are off, I think there’s something to be said for this setup.  And more to the point, folks who start at level -2 might end up feeling like they’ve “earned” their level 1 awesome more thoroughly.  Which is one of the big points of the Zero to Hero concept, right?