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Busy Weekend

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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I spent this weekend working on preparing for various games that are going to be starting soon.

Hunter: The Vigil

First, I’ve almost finsihed knocking the Hunter: The Vigil campaign into shape. I’ve made more work for myself with this than I was intending; see, I did a co-operative world-building thing with the players, and we wound up with something a little farther off the core rules than I had expected. Far enough that I’ve had to create a free-form special powers system to support what I want to do. Which is fine, as far as it goes, but it means that I have to do some extra work with each individual player to set up mechanics for their special abilities.

This is  a little harder and more time-consuming than I had expected. A large part of that comes from the fact that I’m not as familiar with the New World of Darkness system as I am with the old one, and I’m having to do some more reading to make sure I’m not creating more problems for myself than I’m solving. Another part of the delay is the fact that building the powers is enough work that I’ve been putting it off.

But I’m in the home stretch, now, almost done with the power, and with the initial adventure fleshed out. We’re starting the game in a version of Magical Winnipeg that we developed for the Dresden Files RPG Bleeding Alpha Playtest. As we created it for the Dresdenverse, it doesn’t have the dark, horrific aspect that Hunter does, so I’m tweaking things a little. Still, the setting is more in keeping with the power level and the desire for playing supernatural (or at least unusual) characters that the players indicated.

One of the things we did during character creation for this game is to have a sort of collectively-narrated shared prelude for the characters, bringing the group together for the first time. This weekend, I finally got that typed up and distributed. Here’s how the party met:

As Below, So Above

In the spring of 2009, a number of disappearing students at the University of Manitoba attracted the attention of several people who had interests in investigating supernatural occurrences. Izzy, lecturing on civil engineering at the University, knew two of the missing students, and Nicholas knew another – she was the lead singer in his band, Divine Comdey. Liv was the one who tied it together, tracking the information on her site, and that attracted the notice of Vivianne and Ellis.

They began investigating independently, with Vivianne infiltrating the University occult crowd. She found most of them to be posers, but discovered that one of the missing students was a member. She delivered that information to Liv, who had come to town to investigate things in person.

Liv tracked down Izzy and convinced her to give her access to the University computer systems. She found unusual plans for expansion and completion of the tunnels under the University, plans that didn’t make a lot of sense.

Meanwhile, Ellis was on the trail of some stolen rare earths, substances used in many geomantic rituals, from one of the science labs at the University. His investigations lead him to the dorm room of one of the missing students, where he meets Nicholas, who has come to see where they lead singer has disappeared to.

After they established that they are after the same things, they searched the room and find most of her belongings are gone, but discovered her phone in the pocket of a pair of jeans. They decided to take it to Liv, being familiar with her website and tech expertise.

The various investigators got together and compare their findings. Izzy’s interpretation of the building plans allowed Ellis to identify the shape of a sigil linked to earth magic, similar to the patterns used by Neolithic societies in their underground constructions. They were able to tie together information from the occult poseurs with the symbol, the missing rare earths, and their knowledge of the supernatural, determining that someone was planning to sacrifice “builders of stone and delvers of earth” – the engineering students – to power a geomantic rite that would shatter the floodway and flood downtown Winnipeg.

Arming themselves, they proceeded into the steam tunnels, looking for the centre of the ritual – an underground maintenance room beneath the administration building. Earth spirits, roused by the beginnings of the ritual, obscured the area with drifting dust and shifting shadows, distorting the distance and size of the area to make traversing the tunnels difficult. Members of the cult attacked the hunters physically, and the heroes were forced to fight their way into the ritual space.

One of the students had already been sacrificed, and Nicholas’s friend was next on the list when they burst in. In the ensuing battle, the villain managed to sacrifice the singer, and Nicholas killed him for it. They freed the other two sacrifices and fled the tunnels as the backlash from the interrupted ritual called in a deluge of river water to wash the place clean.

So, things are finally moving forward on that front. The first game will happen soon.

The Phoenix Covenant

Finished the map of the area around Stayyin Keep and Covenant, where the game is going to begin. You can see it on Obsidian Portal here. I’m not great with maps, and this one has a number of flaws that jump out at me as I look more closely at it, but all-in-all I’m satisfied with it. It’s got 13 locations marked on it for the party to explore, and about the same number of places that are only marked on my GM version that they may or may not find out during play. The entries of the marked locations are already up on the wiki.

Have I mentioned how much I love Obsidian Portal? I love them lots.

And that was my weekend.

Divine Power Review – A First Look

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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Divine Power is now on the shelves, and I just finished my initial read-through.

Once upon a time, a little over a year ago, I was bemoaning the lack of options currently present in 4E. I said at the time that we had been spoiled by the wealth of published material for 3E, and that it was going to take some time for the 4E publishing schedule to catch up.

With the release of Divine Power, I officially and publically withdraw my complaint. I think we’ve hit the critical mass of options my brain was waiting for before saying, “There. Now there are sufficient choices.” Not that I’m going to turn down the forthcoming choices – if they stay true to form, Primal Power is going to be very cool, and I can’t wait to see the full versions of the monk and the psion in Player’s Handbook 3. It’s just that I’m looking at the books and thinking, “Any player should be able to build a character they like from these options.”

Anyway.

Overall, I like the book, though I find myself not as blown-away as I was with Arcane Power. A lot of that has to do with the subject matter – I like playing divine characters, but I find the arcane characters and choices to be inherently more cool. Divine characters for me are about roleplaying the connection with the god, while arcane players are about pouring flaming death down on your enemies*.

So let’s take a walk through the book and see what there is.

Introduction

Not much new here, just a couple of fluff paragraphs and the usual advice on how to use the book. It takes up about half a page.

Chapter 1: Avenger

The avenger is one of the new divine classes introduced in the PHB2. This chapter does a good job of providing a number of roleplaying options that take the class beyond the “divinely appointed assassin” trope – not that there’s anything wrong with being a divinely appointed assassin; it’s just nice to have other options.

The new build in particular deals with some of the lone-wolf issues that the class has. As a Commanding Avenger, you get a little more of the Leader role grafted onto your Striker, in a manner that I think works nicely. The new powers support this well, while not neglecting the other avenger flavours. All-in-all, a nice collection.

And, of course, some of the best bits are in the sidebars, offering advice and options on actually playing an avenger. Some of these sidebars contain expansions on the core mythology of D&D, as is fitting for a book on the divine. We get to find out about some more things that happened during the war between the gods and the primordials, and why there is night and day, and stuff like that. All very nice.

The paragon paths offered for the avenger don’t thrill me too much, but that’s more to do with my taste than any problem with the paths. They do give a nice mix of ideas for different types of avengers, which I appreciate. There is one issue that bothers me: the Favoured Soul paragon path gets a level 12 encounter power that increases his or her fly speed by 4 squares, but they don’t get a fly speed until level 16. Unless I’m reading it wrong.

Chapter 2: Cleric

This chapter introduces a new build: the Shielding Cleric. This build takes the support aspect of being a Leader and turns it up to 11 by mixing in a bit of the Controller. If you’ve been missing the buffing cleric from 3E, he’s back, and he’s looking good. The assortment of new powers seems to be weighted to favour the Shielding Cleric build, with a number that give bonuses and resistances to allies or penalties and vulnerabilities to enemies. Some do both.

Not all of the powers are focused that way, which is good. There’s plenty of stuff to augment other cleric builds, some of which (like weapon of astral flame) are very cool.

The paragon paths, again, don’t really do much for me, but there’s a decent mix.

Chapter 3: Invoker

The more I think about the invoker, the more I like it. And this chapter does a lot to help foster that affection.

The new Covenant of Malediction gives a slightly (but only slightly) more subtle slant to the class, relying more on fear effects than on pure, raw power. It gives a nice balance to the other build featured in the PHB2. The fluff behind it – the invoker speaking ancient words of devastating power that shatter the mind and body of foes – appeals to my imagination, as well. And the powers are suitably vicious.

One mechanical piece that I’m unsure about is the fact that a lot of the malediction powers do something to the caster – leaving him dazed, for example. Now, admittedly, the powers with that cost are pretty impressive, but it still makes me leery. I don’t currently have any invokers in any of my games, so I don’t know how much it makes those power undesirable in combat. I’ll be interested in seeing what others have to say about it.

The invoker’s paragon paths show some of the more interesting ideas in the book. There are more among this class that I find intriguing than any of the other classes. I think part of that is just my fondness for the class, but come on! How can you not love an idea like the Adept of Whispers or the Keeper of the Nine?

Chapter 4: Paladin

Two new paladin builds, each of which really adds to the idea of playing a holy warrior. In the Post Tenebras Lux game I run, the paladin sometimes just feels like a fighter with a couple of different tricks*. The Ardent Paladin and the Virtuous Paladin builds help deal with that, offering flavourful and functional options for paladins. The paladin has to give up lay on hands to get the goodies, but the goodies are pretty good.

This chapter also addes the idea of divine sanction, a secondary type of marking ability for the paladin that works nicely in concert with divine challenge to help the paladin be a stickier Defender. A number of the new powers bestow or key off of divine sanction, as well, making it a nice new addition.

Of the paragon paths, the Gray Guard stands out in my mind as the most interesting. This is a pragmatic, do-what-it-takes kind of paladin that completely undercuts the Lawful-Stupid Paladin stereotype. The other paragon paths mainly focus on whether you kill demons, dragons, devils, or undead best.

Chapter 5: Divine Options

This section brings back the idea of Domains, with a set of feats to incorporate them into your character. I like Domains; I like the idea that a cleric or paladin of Pelor is functionally different from one of Bahamut. The implementation of the Domains looks very workable, with each deity having three Domains, and each Domain having two feats. One feat gives you a skill bonus and a little something extra for one of your powers, and the other feat gives you a new power.

There’s also a section called Your Deity and You, which focuses on roleplaying options for the servants of the various gods. 4E has been very heavy on mechanics over roleplaying thus far, and it’s very nice to see this section included, along with another section on Divine Backgrounds.

New feats, of course. Scads of them, including several new multiclass feats. As is typical of the Power series, a large proportion of the feats are specific to the classes in the book, sometimes paired with specific races. Lots of new options. I haven’t read them all, yet, but they look pretty tasty.

Then we’ve got 10 epic destinies, 7 of which are avatars of various kinds (i.e. Avatar of Death, Avatar of Storms, etc.). They all look pretty nice, but it’s going to be a while before my games get far enough along for those to be really useful to me.

The book wraps up with eight new rituals, which is good, including one for creating holy water, which is very nice to have back in the game.

 

So, there’s the book. As I said, I like it, if not quite as much as Arcane Power. Lots of good choices in it.

Go buy it.

 

 

*Although, in 4E, you can do this with divine characters, too. Especially the invoker. Back

*Part of the issue is that he’s the only Defender in the group. Paladin, cleric, rogue, ranger, sorcerer, and avenger. Have I mentioned how my players looooooove the Strikers? Back

Saturday Night One-Shot

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My friend Fera sent out this link last Wednesday.

Within a few minutes, my friend Clint sent this reply:

OK, anybody want to play a one-shot game this weekend.

‘Robot Wasteland’ – It is nearly a century after the holocaust, when the EATRs progressed from eating dead organic matter to ANY organic matter. Robotic killers roamed far and wide in search of sustenance. It was not long before the EATRs infested the first Manufacturies, creating the next generation of redesigned Devourers. From that point onward, human civilization was doomed. After a century, the remaining living creatures on earth haunt a ghostworld of shattered wasteland that expands as the Devourers exhaust their resources.

You are one of the survivors. What will you do to tip the balance of power back in favour of life.

At first I thought he was joking. Putting together a one-shot in that short a time is a lot of work. But a number of people were jumping on the bandwagon. I had lunch with him on Thursday, and asked if he was serious.

He said yes. I was soooooo in.

He decided to use OpenQuest, which is a hybrid system based on Mongoose Publishing’s RuneQuest SRD, remixed with some ideas from the original RuneQuest and Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying. It’s a quick, fairly simple system, especially the way Clint scaled down some of the detail to speed things along. Fast to learn, easy to use and adapt.

The game actually didn’t finish in one session – it’s an easy system, but every system has some ramp-up time, and we had two people in the group who hadn’t played it before*. And, speaking from experience, it’s tough to judge how much of a new game people will get through in the evening. So it looks like the game may wind up being a two-shot.

Clint went with a tried-and-true scenario: all the characters are captured by the Devourers, the robot eating machines, in the ruins of Many Police. The Devourers are mounting an attack on Junkyard, the largest human settlement in the area. The characters have to escape captivity and make it back to Junkyard with a warning to save humanity.

He put together some nice pregenerated characters for us to use, too. I wound up playing an acolyte of the Cult of Iron, heavily armoured and able to “persuade” metal to behave in certain ways – repairing simple things, making my armour weightless, powering my chainsword. We also had a psychic with clairvoyance and healing ability, a gun-fu jedi-type, and a Gear Cultist with an EMP device*.

We started out locked in a cage, armoured but without our weapons and other gear. After the initial description of what was happening, my character, Brother Puddler, distracted the robots left behind to deal with us by trying to convert them to his faith* while the Gear Cultist jimmied the lock and the psychic located our gear. The others ran for the weapons, while I tore out an iron bar from the cage and used it to hold off the attacking robots. Did pretty well, too, except for a lucky critical in the early rounds reducing me to one usable arm.

After we got out of there, we headed for Junkyard, making our way through the ruins. And, of course, we got attacked by an old RuneQuest monster: rubble-runners. Think rats the size of bulldogs with mouths like aligators. They proved surprisingly challenging, and ate up the rest of the evening.

It was a fun game, and I’m eager to finish it off. Clint did a great job of putting it together, especially in so short a time.

And what else?

Well, it’s got me thinking about running more one-shots. OpenQuest is a simple system to adapt to other settings, and a nice choice to build one-shots. I’ve put off a number of interesting game ideas in the past because they’d only stand up for one or two sessions, but now I have a tool to turn them into something playable in an evening without it taking a month and a half of prep.

Now all I need is more space in the schedule to do it.

 

 

*Actually, they pretty much had, in my Call of Cthulhu one-shot, but that was a while ago, and the differences were just enough to disguise it. Back

*As you can tell, this wasn’t just a rip-off of Terminator. It was a rip-off of Terminator mixed with rip-offs of Fallout, Feng-Shui, Warhammer 40,000, and a bunch of other influences. Clint mixes and matches some of the tastiest settings I’ve ever played in. Back

*Primary doctrine of the Cult of Iron: metal subservient to the will of man, because metal is soulless, and man is too physically weak. Only by the joining of the two, with the soul of man providing the divine guidance, can the two species progress. At least, that’s what I decided it was on Saturday. Back

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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Finally got together for another Storm Point session this past Sunday.

We’d left the previous session with everyone somewhat beat up from the wraiths, and they spent the first part of the session trying to decide if they should try and find a place inside the villa to hole up for an extended rest, or to retreat and find someplace in the forest to camp for an extended rest. No one thought they should push on, which was interesting to me – obviously, they felt that they’d taken some serious hurt. Listening to them discuss it, it seemed to me that the issue was less about how injured they were, and more about the fact that they had pretty much all used up their daily powers*.

If they had retreated and hidden in the forest, I was planning to let them use one of the skill checks mentioned in previous reports to find a concealed camp site. However, upon return, the forces in the villa would have been reinforced.

And there was no way in hell I was going to let them find a safe spot inside the villa to rest.

They decided on a fairly subtle plan*: rather than go wandering the halls, looking for someplace to rest, they pried loose a couple of planks in the ceiling and climbed up into the room above, which was an abandoned indoor garden, with dead plants in pots and planters everywhere. It was sparsely visited, judging by the signs on the floor, and the door was swollen and stuck, but it showed some signs of being opened in the not too distant past.

This is where they decided to camp.

I figured that the shadar-kai and their minions were searching the building after the noise of the battle, so I rolled a d6 to see when they would happen on this room, multiplying the result by 30 minutes. So, an hour and a half into the rest, an ogre kicked down the door.

The fight did not go the way I expected.

See, I wanted to simulate hordes of humanoids, backed by a pair of shadar-kai. My plan was to have a base bunch of monsters* attack and, every time a minion was slain, another would join the fight the next round. This replenishment would stop once the two shadar-kai were killed.

So, what went wrong? Well, one thing was that I let the players level up between the last game and this one. That let the fighter take the power rain of steel, which is one of the better mook erasers in the game. In general, though, the minions just weren’t enough of a threat to the party. They didn’t hit often enough, or do enough damage when they hit, to really be much of a factor in the combat, especially after the swordmage’s opening round of multiple area of effect attacks.

Also, I  made a mistake in trying to get the shadar-kai into the fight. They shadow jaunted into the room, past the dwarf fighter corking the door, to attack from behind. This left them the main focus of all the other characters in the room, and they got spanked in about three rounds.

In that time, I got another wave of pretty much every group of minions – and two waves of the ogre – and had the orcs bash holes through the lath and plaster walls to let the rest of the minions into the room. It was too little, too late, though, and the fight just wasn’t as tough as I’d planned it to be. Something I’m going to have to keep in mind with using minions in the future*.

Anyway.

Afterwards, they smashed the altar to Vecna in the main court, cleaned off the blood that had been used to mark the place with his holy symbol, and searched the villa. They found a teleportation circle, whose symbols they have noted down, and a chest of money and magic items sent by Tolvas Shadowborn to aid in an assault against Storm Point.

Hopefully, they’ll be able to do something about that.

*This is something I’ve noticed more and more in 4E. Resource managment is spread among all the characters, where in previous editions it was primarily the concern of spellcasters. Now, characters can keep on going if they’ve used up their big daily powers, but they start to try and assess what sorts of challenges lie ahead, and figure out if they need to refresh that particular resource. Healing surges are almost a secondary concern, at least in the groups I’ve run. Back

*At least, by their standards. Back

*A shadar-kai witch, a shadar-kai warrior, eight goblin cutters, eight hobgoblin grunts, five orc drudges, and an ogre thug – 1,524 xp; a level 6 encounter for 6 characters. Back

*WotC has noticed that the minions just weren’t as much of a viable threat as they might have planned. The minions in the MM2 now have roles and a little more in the way of effective powers. Back

Groundwork – The Phoenix Covenant

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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For those who are interested, I’ve finished the preliminary wiki for The Phoenix Covenant on Obsidian Portal.

Now, I’m in an interesting position, game-prep-wise. I’ve got the world pretty much designed, but the design is not current with the game – it is 500 years out of date. This was deliberate: with the village of Covenant being sealed off from the outside world, all they have is information on what the world was like when they closed the Phoenix Gate. Nothing on how it has changed.

Of course, that means that I don’t know how it’s changed, yet, either.

That’s okay, though; I don’t need details on all the changes just yet. I don’t have to worry too much about whether the Imperial City still exists, or if there’s a smoking crater where it once was. It’s going to take some time before my two intrepid explorers make it that far south. What I need to know right now is what changes have occurred around Covenant and Stayyin Keep. In short, I need the first adventure.

Way back a long time ago, Ray Winninger wrote some brilliant articles on building a D&D campaign. They were published in Dragon Magazine as the Dungeoncraft column*. A couple of pieces of advice from those columns – things he referred to as the Rules of Dungeoncraft – have stuck with me over the years, and I’m going to try adhering to them as much as I can.

The first one is the advice to not create more than you need to. Stay focused on the things that the characters are going to interact with at this point in their adventuring careers. So, for starting out, give them simple things: a home base, some wilderness to explore, and one or two adventure sites.

Now, the fact that I have created the wiki detailing the entire Empire may seem to violate that rule. I felt I needed the high-level coverage, given the campaign premise. If you look through the wiki articles, you’ll see that most things get only a few sentences. The details are saved for the history of the Empire (i.e. “Why are we locked underground?”) and the village of Covenant (i.e. “So, what’s it like where we grew up?”). The rest is pretty sparse.

The other piece of advice I’m trying to stick to from Ray’s column is the suggestion that, whenever I create something important about the campaign – a place, an NPC, an organization, a religion – I create at least one secret about it. You write these down on index cards. When you build an adventure, pick a card from the stack, and drop a little clue to that secret into the adventure. I did this in the Broken Chains campaign to great success, even seeding some of the clues into the campaign newspaper for the characters to follow up on. It creates a great way for the players to pick and choose which things they care about, and provides direction for the game.

Which brings me to where I’m at right now.

To get the game ready to play, I need to flesh out the area around Covenant and Stayyin Keep, both detailing the region and creating the secrets deck. In doing this, there are certain design goals I need to keep in mind:

  • I’m planning on opening up the game to more people, playing successive groups leaving Covenant to help restore civilization to the world. The initial area has to be able to support multiple groups doing different things.
  • I want more of a sandbox feel to the game than in previous campaigns I’ve run, with the players free to explore where they want and set their own priorities and agendas.
  • I want different types of encounters in the game – some combat, some skill challenge, some roleplaying, some combinations.
  • I want things to be dynamic, with changes based on the characters’ actions.
  • I want meaningful choices for the players, so that their decisions determine the encounters and situations they come across, rather than just which order they fight the monsters in.
  • I want to maintain the mix of post-apocalyptic feel with the general D&D fantasy milieu.

So, given those goals, I have some basic idea about what the area is going to contain:

  • Lots of choices, with different areas and things to find.
  • Ruins, some inhabited, some not. Also, other signs of an epic magical war leaving scars on the world.
  • Different groups in the area with different agendas that the characters can interact with in different ways.
  • Some nasty-bad mutant monsters*.

And this brings me to my next steps in getting the game ready:

  1. Create a player map of the area circa IY 897. This is what the players will have to guide their initial explorations.
  2. Create a GM map of the same area showing what’s changed in 500 years, and marking out all the various sites and encounter areas.
  3. Deciding what the current situation at Stayyin Keep is.
  4. Deciding how much of a dungeon crawl I want the initial departure from Covenant to be*.
  5. Mapping out the dungeon crawl (probably in flow-chart form rather than a traditional map) and setting the encounters in it.
  6. Doing up the monster stats and treasure package distribution.

Now, steps 1 and 2 are probably going to take the longest. Really, I need to make sure that I have step 1 done, then work on steps 2 and 3 while concentrating on steps 4, 5, and 6, which are going to see the most immediate play.

And that’s what I’m working on for the game right now.

 

 

*The articles are available here. I hasten to add that I have no idea about the copyright status of the articles, or the legality of them appearing on this site. I have my own copies. Back

*Okay, so this one isn’t a product of my explicitly stated design goals. But this is a D&D game, where there should be nasty-bad monsters, and it is a post-apocalyptic game, where there should be mutants. So… Back

*I know I want it to be a bit of a dungeon crawl, for a few reasons. First, it hearkens back to the first Fallout game, where you have to make your way through a cave full of rats when you first leave the vault. Second, it gives me a chance to start showing some of the changes in the world brought on by the war. And third, it allows me to stick in another jumping-off point for other exploration of deeper caverns and maybe even the Underdark. Back

Post Tenebras Lux Report

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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Last Friday night was the latest session of the Post Tenebras Lux campaign*. Only four of the six players were able to show, so I decided not to advance the plot too much, and to keep things centred around Brindol. At the same time, I didn’t want to spend the whole session shopping, with the players looking through books and counting out their pennies to see what magic items they could afford and chatting amiably to random insignificant NPCs.

As a solution, I told the players that they could do their shopping via e-mail after this session, and that I would make sure they had all the information they needed to do so*.  I also encouraged them to do some research to see what they could find out about the Ghostlord and the Thornwaste, which is their next objective in the game. And, of course, I had a few encounters on hand to spice things up.

So, the party spent a little while scouting out the market fair, buying some ale and tankards, sending letters home, and doing some research. On the research side of things, I had about a page and a half of information about the Ghostlord, with DCs on getting it going up to the mid-twenties. They managed to get it all in the minimum number of rolls that it could have taken, because they were rolling hot.

They took a little time to talk and think about the information, and then they started looking a little antsy, like they wanted to hit the road. I didn’t want them running off from Brindol on the mission just yet, so I pulled a bandit encounter out of my notes, and an encounter with a group of priests of Ioun coming to view the ruins of the recently cleared Rivenroar Castle, and decided that the priests were ambushed by the bandits on the road. One guard escaped and carried word to Brindol, and the temple of Ioun asked the party to help*. 

Now, when I run something off the cuff like this, I tend to like to be pretty vague about the setup, and let the players show me what they want through the choices they make. So, when they asked where this had happened, I told them it was a couple of hours outside of town. When they asked if they could borrow horses from the temple, I said sure. Then, when they asked how they could sneak up on the site and scope it out, I said, “Skill challenge.”

I set the DC of the skill checks at 12, and didn’t limit their skill choices in any way. I told them to tell me what they were doing with each turn, and then, if I liked the idea, I dropped the DC by 2. If the idea was boring or a repeat, I boosted the DC by 2*. Based on what they did, I decided that they found the site, found evidence of elven archers, a shallow grave holding most of the guards, and a trail leading to an abandoned farmhouse in the wooded hills near the road.

They continued on with the skill challenge, using it to get the drop on the bandit hideout. That meant that I mapped out the area on the battlemap, and told them to place themselves wherever they wanted, as long as they weren’t in line of sight of one of the enemies* they could see.

It was kind of late when we got to the combat, and it ran kind of long, but it was a fun fight. The party almost had everything their own way, but they got a couple of surprises, as well, from the hidden bandits. Everyone got to do something interesting, and the fight ranged over most of the map – even off it, in two situations.

So, we wrapped up after that, but I’m pretty sure a good time was had by all.

 

 

*For those who are wondering what’s up with the lack of Storm Point updates, well, there hasn’t been a game in some time, thanks to busy summer schedules of the players. We’re hoping for this Sunday. Back

*Because of the way I hang on to the character sheets between sessions so that I have them on hand if a player can’t show, sometimes the players aren’t sure how much coin they’ve got. This is aggravated by the fact that I use Campaign Coins for the money; strangely enough, I’ve found that, if they have the actual physical coins, the players don’t seem to count them very often. But everyone likes jingling them. Back

*After all, they’d been the ones who had cleared Rivenroar Castle in the first place, back when this was still on the Scales of War adventure path. Back

*This is an idea I have stolen gleefully from Robin D. Laws and Jonathan Tweet’s brilliant RPG Over the Edge, where boring descriptions of combat tactics get you a penalty to your attack. Back

*They could see two sentries on the hills around the house, and an archer up in the loft of a barn that was nearing collapse. In total, there were three human bandits, three elf archers, a dwarf hammerer, and a half-elf bandit captain, for a total of 1,200 xp; a level 5 encounter for 6 characters. Back

The Phoenix Covenant – Starting a New Campaign

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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So, this past weekend, my friends Penny and Clint asked if I would be interested in running a small game, just for the two of them.

In the past, I’d run a fairly long-lived Eberron game for them, but it got lost in the shuffle of some non-game things intruding on my life*. By the time my schedule had cleared sufficiently to go back to the game, we’d all lost the thread of what was going on, so we let it die. Well, in the midst of the discussions this weekend, I told them how I had envisioned the final few adventures (we were about six or eight sessions from wrapping it up), so we got a little closure on it.

So. A new game. I asked them what they wanted to play, and they really didn’t know. Penny suggested something post-apocalyptic*, and Clint suggested one of the campaign frameworks I had proposed for the Hunter: The Vigil game that is slowly moving towards start-up. I sent them an e-mail when I had had some more time to think about things, outlining the things I’d be prepared to run. These included a new 4E Eberron game, a modern fantasy game using pretty much any set of rules I had, other World of Darkness games, Star Wars, and even Star Trek*.

The other thing I suggested was something that I’d been working on for some months – strangely enough, it was a post-apocalyptic 4E campaign, based on things like the Fallout video games and the Earthdawn setting. I called The Phoenix Covenant, and here’s the opening pitch:

The Empire of Nerath faces destruction.

King Elidyr takes up arms against the Ruler of Ruin and his seemingly endless horde of rabid gnolls, calling on the old covenants with the other free folk of the world to aid in their defense.

Ancient magics are unearthed and new ones created – magics that can rend stone and split the skies to unleash fury and death.

Bargains are struck with powers from the Astral Sea and the Elemental Chaos, with the rulers of the Feywild and the dark mistress of the Shadowfell.

Some fear it will not be enough. And some don’t think that the Ruler of Ruin will stop with Nerath.

And some fear that the powers arrayed on both sides may sunder the world forever.

The wise folk of the world gather together on the eve of destruction, and create the Phoenix Covenant.

That the Light shall not be forever extinguished.

And here’s the Phoenix Covenant Declaration:

Whereas the free nations of the world, and the allies thereof, whom shall be called the Light, face the armies of the Ruler of Ruin, and

Whereas the armies of the Ruler of Ruin leave naught but devastation in their wake, and seek neither to claim land nor to build upon it, and

Whereas the advance of the armies of the Ruler of Ruin show fair to overwhelm the defenses of the Light, and

Whereas in the loss of the Light, many wonders of civilization, culture, and learning would fade and pass from the world, and

Whereas such a loss is deemed unacceptable by the wise of the Light:

Therefore let there be founded now the Phoenix Covenant, which members have affixed their names hereto, with the following goals:

First, to survive the coming war.

Second, to preserve from destruction those matters of value which form the core of the societies of the Light.

Third, to hold in trust for the survivors of the coming war the wherewithal to return to the heights of modern civilization.

Fourth, to provide such resources to the survivors at the conclusion of the war, in order to assist them in regaining what they have lost.

Fifth, to nurture and train such heroic members of our band as may be necessary to defend and effect our goals.

Unto these ends, we shall take a collection of wise and skilled folk, representative of all races and crafts, apart from the nations of the world into a secret place, called Covenant, where they shall be hidden safe from discovery by the most powerful magics available to us. Covenant shall be provisioned and provided with all necessary substances to allow the inhabitants thereof to survive in perpetuity without need of congress with the outer world, such arrangements created through our enchantments. All contact with Covenant, save only through the Phoenix Gate, shall be proscribed and prevented, whether from the material world or any of the adjacent planes. The remnants of our society shall open the Phoenix Gate after the scourge of the Ruler of Ruin has abated, and it is time for our society to fulfill its purpose. Should no member of our outer society survive, then the Phoenix Gate shall open after a period of five hundred years, and the heroes of Covenant will be sent forth to explore and reclaim the land.

May the gods favour our undertaking, and grant us the faith and fortitude to see it done.

Done on the 8th day of Full Spring, in the 14th Year of the Reign of Elidyr, feared to be the last Emperor.

And here’s the final sting to get the campaign rolling:

No one ever came to let you out.

So, you prepared, honing yourselves into the heroes that the world would need, learning what you could from the Masters of Covenant. You learned to fight, to lead, to work magic and deception. You learned the words of the gods and the whispers of hidden powers. You pored over maps of the Empire of Nerath, though you knew you would find everything changed.

You made ready.

Now, the day is almost upon you. In two weeks, the Phoenix Gate will open, and the heroes of Covenant will return to the world.

All you must do is prove that you are worthy to be among them.

Well, they picked this idea for the game. Part of the allure is that it is heavily influenced by the stuff we’re all playing as a video game right now. Another big part is that I already had a bunch of background, including a map*, written and ready to go.

There were a few concerns, though. First off, I had planned this for a big campaign ramp-up in the fall, inviting all my gamer friends to play, but spiltting the respondents into two groups if more than six wanted in. But that’s easily fixed; I can still do that in the fall – the story will just change slightly so that a smaller advance group went out a couple of weeks before. Everyone who wants to will still get to play the game.

Second was a bigger problem. Running 4E with two players is going to be a tough balancing act. I’m still somewhat concerned about being able to properly set the encounter strength, and the small number of players means that I’ll be running smaller numbers of monsters. Most worrisome, though, is how things will work without all the roles covered*.

I’m addressing this concern in a couple of different ways. First, I’m starting the characters at 3rd level. That gives me some breathing room on the experience point budgets for creating encounters. Second, I’m giving them some really nice things with the Bribe(TM). This time around, I’m asking for four things (one of which is mandatory), and giving them the pick from a list of four choices (each choice only once). What can they pick up with the Bribe(TM)?

  • +2 to any one attribute.
  • One extra 1st-level At-Will Attack power.
  • One extra feat for which they qualify.
  • One extra trained skill from their class skill list.

Looking at the list, I think it’s almost a recipe for munchkinism. However, given the nature of these two players, and the fact that there are only two characters in the game, I’m willing to risk it. Besides, I can always up the challenge of the encounters if it looks like the characters are just walking through them.

Anyway, we’re going to wait until after July 21 to create characters – that’s when Divine Power hits the shelves, and I want them to have the options in the book, because at least one of them is talking about multi-classing into cleric for some extra healing.

I’ve put up my background notes and the map on Obsidian Portal if you’d care to take a look. You’ll notice that a number of the names (Nerath, Arkhosia, Bael Turath, Cendriane, etc.) are lifted right from the 4E books. I thought that the folks at WotC did such a good job building a loose backstory for the world that I decided to use it in my game with only minor changes.

First game will be either early August or late August. Mid-August, I’m going to GenCon.

 

 
*Work got very busy, I ran out of time to prep. Back

*All three of us have been playing a lot of Fallout 3. Back

*What can I say? The recent movie got me so excited about the universe again, that I started to think about running a game in it. Back

*Done in Campaign Cartographer 3, using their Mercator style, from the 2008 annual. I was very pleased with how it turned out. Back

*From initial discusions, it looks like they’re leaning towards playing a sorcerer and a ranger. My players just looooooove the strikers! Back

Drawing the Line – Willing Suspension of Disbelief in Gaming

By | | What's he playing?
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So, my last post generated some vocal and literate counterpoints. These made me realize that I had left an important piece out of my discussion, which is what I want to talk about this time.

When does a legitimate concern about verisimilitude become an irritating quibble about realism?*

My answer to this is the idea of the willing suspension of disbelief.

Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined this phrase, saying that if a writer could create enough interest in and verisimilitude within a fantastic tale, the reader would overlook the story’s implausibility. Roleplaying games are the same way.

The trick, though, is the necessity of verismilitude. Things have to fit together in a manner that makes sense, that doesn’t strain our credulity. In short, we can’t ask too much of the audience (the players, in a game) in the way of suspending their disbelief. We have to make it easy for them to do so. And if it get’s too hard for them to overlook the things that aren’t making sense to them, they will start to call you on it.

What’s asking too much, though? Every group – hell, every player – is going to have their own limit. You find that limit usually only when you surpass it, so it can be hard to judge, especially with people you don’t know well. I’ve been gaming with my group for years (some of them for decades), so I know pretty much where everyone draws their line, and I work to respect it in running games. When I overstep, I pull back, and we sort it out.

See, I’ve discovered that people will only talk about how unrealistic a game is in one situation: when the game world does not respond as they expect it to. Expectations of how the world will respond are based on two factors: how the real world works, and how you’ve shown them that the game world is different from the real world.

Let’s be honest. We all have to start with the assumption that certain things in the game world will be like things in the real world. We generally play games where we have cause and effect, the basics of real-world physics, sentient characters, environmental dangers, etc. You can expect the game to have gravity, even if it’s generated by a machine in a space ship, for example.

As GMs, it becomes our responsibility to show how the world of the game is different from the real world. We show off certain differences right at the beginning of the game – people may play non-humans and have fantastic powers – but others are shown through play and only emerge as the game progresses. For example, the players may not know that the gravity of their world is caused by a magic gem set deep in the ground until they actually stumble across it on their explorations and have to escape from its terrible grip. Even then, the possibility of such a gem must have been inherent in the game – it would work in a fantasy game with magic, but not in a hard science fiction game**.

Players have only the real world and our description of the game world to base their decisions in-game on. If they take an action expecting a certain outcome based on these factors, and that outcome doesn’t occur, it creates a gap in the experience that forces them to rethink, and breaks the immersion and suspension of disbelief. This is when they start asking the difficult questions about why something didn’t happen the way they expected.

Now, some gaps in expectation are good. They lead to story, and therefor to game. For example, if the party is hired to rescue a princess from an evil duke, and they then find out that the duke actually rescued her from her tyrannical father, the party has more challenging adventure ahead of them as they side with the duke to overthrow the despotic king.

On the other hand, if the party is suddenly drowned in a shallow stream because you’ve changed the property of buoyancy in your world and it just hadn’t come up yet, that’s a bad gap in expectation, and you can expect a heated conversation to follow.

What’s the difference between the two? Well, aside from one being a pretty neat setup for a lengthy adventure and the other being a lame-ass TPK, the major difference is coolness.

Here’s something I’ve found in my lengthy career as a GM: Players will let you get away with anything as long as it lets their characters do more cool stuff. Even if it only implies that their characters have the potential to do more cool stuff.

It’s not free, though. The coolness has to be in proportion with the amount of nonsense you want them to swallow. If you want to have horses in your world replaced by riding dinosaurs, somebody’s going to start wondering about how you domesticate them, considering how hard it is to train reptiles – right up until the moment they see the Royal Tyrant Cavalry mounted on their armoured T-Rexes. Then they go, “Cooooooool!” And start trying to figure out how to get their own armoured T-Rex***.

Coolness covers a multitude of sins. If you plan on adding nonsense to a game – and really, we all like to do that – you’ve got to dip it in a layer of cool thick enough to make it palatable.

And when you cross the line and can’t cover it in cool? Well, then you have a couple of choices. You can either change things to make more sense, or you can create a reason why it makes sense the way it is. Why can’t a fireball blow open the walls of a small room with superheated air? The actual reason is that it opens up a wide range of new concerns that the GM has to juggle – how thick a wall can be blown out? What if a door is open? Do we get 1E-style fireball blowback? Does that mean I have to calculate the volume of the sphere and convert it to five-foot cubes to figure out how far back the wizard has to be standing? The complications compound.

So, you make up an in-game reason – the fire is instantaneous, transported to the site from the plane of fire, and it goes back there after the spell effect is complete, along with the extra volume of superheated air. Add in an effect where a strong wind blows in to the origin point of the fireball (no game effect), and you’ve generated your apologia, along with a little touch of cool to go with it.

A lot of this stuff has to do with the play style of your group, as well. Some groups like a very simulationist experience, where everything faithfully adheres to as many of the real-world assumptions as possible within the genre context. Some groups like things lighter and more free-wheeling, concerned with the spectacle over reality. And some only care about what serves the story. Your group is going to draw its line in a different place than my group.

But there will be a line.

You help to draw it, as the GM, but it’s the players who monitor it most closely. You must respect it if you want your game to be fun for you and for your players.

 

 

 

*I’m using these words in a specific, somewhat artificial way. My arbitrary contention is that it’s okay to talk about verisimilitude in the game, but that talking about realism in a fantasy endeavour is pointless. See my previous post.

**Maybe it could, but I can’t think of a way to do it without resorting to technobabble and applied phlebotinum.

***And for those who start to question how the riders make ground attacks, you distract them with the velociraptor-mounted skirmishers.

Realism vs. Verisimilitude in RPGs, or You’re an Elf That Uses Magic

By | | What's he playing?
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I’m going to make a statement here, one that I believe to be true based on a quarter century and more of gaming.

No one wants to play a realistic game.

I’m going to make another statement now, one that I know to be true based on a quarter century and more of gaming.

People will still complain about a game not being realistic.

Both statements are true. This can get confusing, but it’s really all about that word, “realistic.” I have a friend who studied philosophy but gave it up because he felt that all modern philosophy came down to arguing over the meaning of words. I can see that. This very important point comes down to the meaning of “real.”

For most of us who aren’t billionaire super-spies, gaming is escapism*, something we do to inject some vicarious excitement into our mostly mundane and routine lives. It’s power fantasy and storytelling and socializing and getting out of your own head. That means that we don’t want to play something that mimics our everyday life** – we get enough of our everyday lives in everyday life.

That’s one value of real. And we don’t want it.

Even if we’re playing a simulation of some sort – WWII miniatures, for example – we still don’t want it to be real. We don’t want to spend hours trying to push our tanks forward three inches on the table, or have to roll for logistical and communications foul-ups***. We want to deal with the fun parts of the subject, not with the tedious ones.

Let’s especially look at fantasy and sf games. Even the hardest of the hard sf games**** interjects a few elements of impossibility: FTL technology, aliens, whatever. And when you wind up playing, as the title of this post suggests, an elf that uses magic, you pretty much forfeit any right to decry a lack of realism. I mean, if you swallow the assumption of a near-immortal race changing reality around them with a thought, why would you balk at the idea that the economic scheme for buying, selling, and creating magic items doesn’t make any sense*****?

Now we’re getting somewhere. “Doesn’t make any sense.” That’s the key.

See, when we talk about whether a game is realistic or not, we’re not really talking about that. We’re talking about whether the game seems realistic or not. We’re talking about internal consistency, logical coherence, and believability. We’re talking about saying, “Given the basic assumptions about the world and setting the game presupposes, this makes sense.”

The word we’re really talking about is, “verisimilitude.” The quality of something seeming real or true.

This term comes up a lot in drama and fiction. One of my acting teachers, lo, these many years ago, used to say (I wrote it down and kept it, because I liked it):

If you ever start to feel that you are the person you are portraying on stage, please let me know immediately. Then have a little lie-down while I call a psychiatrist. We don’t become our roles; we are actors. We act as if we had become our roles. If you can’t make that distinction, the stage is not the place for you.

When we game, we don’t want the game world to be like the real world. We want the game world to behave as if ****** it were a real world. We want it to follow a coherent, internal structure that meets our ideas of cause and effect, allowing us to understand the relationships within that world.

We want it to make sense.

Which, when you think about it, is pretty weird, because we don’t necessarily have the same expectations of reality. Aristotle said:

With respect to the requirements of art, a probable impossibility is to be preferred to a thing improbable and yet possible.

What does that mean? Well, the real world is full of strangeness. Coincidence and synchronicity abound. Things happen every day that, if we read them in a book, we would point out as being far too coincidental. And in a game, they become very suspicious. Here’s an example:

  • If I go on vacation to Hawaii and run into my next-door neighbour there, we both say, “Wow. That’s weird.” Then we get on with our lives.
  • If a character in a book goes on vacation to Hawaii and runs into his next-door neighbour, we say, “Yeah, right. That’s completely unbelievable.” Despite the fact that such things can, and do, happen in real life.
  • In a game, if a character goes to a far away land, and runs into his next-door neighbour, the character says, “I wonder what he’s up to. Did he follow me here? Is he working for my enemies?” And then he attempts to knock his neighbour out and lock him in a trunk.

My point is that, in a constructed reality like fiction or gaming, we avoid certain aspects of reality, such as coincidence, as violating our sense of the real, despite the fact that such things are very much a part of reality. Reality, as Stephen King says, is Ralph*******.

Now, how this applies to gaming.

When you build an adventure, you need to keep the What, the How, and the Why in mind.

  • What. What happens? What is the event, the item, the character, the location? What do the characters have to do? What are the villains doing? This the core of most adventures, and serves as the starting point in development in a lot of cases.
  • How. What is the mechanism by which the What happens? If the villains are scrying on the characters, what magic are they using? If they’re going to blot out the sun, what device does that, and how does it work? If the characters run into their childhood friends, how does it come about? This is the first layer of explanation and verisimilitude, providing support and rationale for seeming coincidences. Players assume that this is here, even if it’s not, so best to be prepared.
  • Why. What’s the reason for the What? Why are the villains trying to blot out the sun? Why did the childhood friends come to the far away vacation land? This is the second layer of explanation and verismilitude. Again, players will assume it exists, so it’s a good idea for it to exist.

In a game, players don’t believe in coincidence. Everything is motivated by something, and that something revolves around the characters. This is a reasonable assumption; they are the stars of the story, and everything usually does revolve around them. Put some thought and preparation into it, and it helps the game feel richer and more real.

Now, there’s another type of realism bugaboo that rears its head from time to time. This is the real-world expert that tries to apply his real-world knowledge to the game world in order to squeeze some in-game benefit out of what he’s doing. This is the guy who argues that the heat of a fireball should cause the air to expand and knock out the walls of the building, or that, because he can fall 416 feet in a round, he should have a fly move of 83 squares. Or at least 40, because he’s gliding laterally. Or the economist who questions the stability of a kingdom’s currency because a hard metal standard can’t meet the needs of exchange and credit.

You know what to say to them, right?

“You’re an elf that uses magic. You don’t get to talk about realism.”

 

 

 

*I expect that billionaire super-spy gamers use gaming as a means of grounding themselves, and chilling out.

**”So, you’ve completed the website update. Roll your Dreamweaver skill check to see if you closed all the tags.”

***Now that I’ve written that statement, I’m sure there’s someone out there going, “But we do! That’s what our game is all about!” So, for you folks, I resort to this rebuttal: “That may be, but you sure don’t have real people really dying.” Those who disagree with this somewhat snarky and hyperbolic argument are free to discuss it with their local constabulary.

****I’m thinking probably Traveler 2300. At least, of the ones I’m familiar with.

*****And, really, who’s to say it doesn’t? When’s the last time you brewed a potion of invisibility? How much did you get for selling it?

******Stanislavsky talks about this idea at length in An Actor Prepares. He calls it, “the magic if.”

*******For an explanation of this weird little phrase, you’re going to have to read Lisey’s Story.

Eberron Player’s Guide Review

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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I’ve been dragging my feet over reviewing this book, because it’s really only half the setting, and therefor somewhat incomplete. The setting won’t be complete until the Campaign Guide comes out next month.

But I’ve always had a soft spot for Eberron. It is, hands down, my favourite official D&D setting, from any edition or version of the game. The mix of noire and pulp sensibility with the high fantasy of D&D, the predisposition to cinematic scenes in play, and the rich (and largely unexplored) backstory of the game world just really appeal to me.

The Player’s Guide is, overall, a good book. It’s certainly got me wanting more. There are some things in it that I’m not so sure about, and some things that I think are missing, but that’s going to be the case with any book. This book delivers more than enough to fulfill its purpose: giving players what they need to play in an Eberron game.

Let’s go through the book chapter by chapter.

Introduction

The introduction features Ten Important Facts, which are very similar to the original ones that were printed with the initial relase of Eberron for 3E. They’ve dropped the point about new races in favour of one on the Draconic Prophesy, and the order has been slightly rearranged. It winds up highlighting the interplay between the Draconic Prophesy, the Dragonmarked Houses, and Dragonshards, which is not a bad thing.

Chapter 1: Life in Eberron

This chapter covers the basics of geography, history, religion, power groups, and day-to-day life. It introduces some of the main themes and conflicts inherent in the setting, and just generally gives a player a nice overview of what the world is like from the ground level.

There are two pages of maps here, miniatures of the poster map that comes with the Campaign Guide. And I have to say that, if the full size version lives up to the promise of the miniature versions, they will be some of the nicest world maps ever done in a D&D product. The maps in the main campaign book were always one of my pet peeves about 3E Eberron – the large scale map didn’t show the political borders, roads, rails, or cities, and the small-scale maps didn’t show those things outside the border of the nation they depicted. It made the maps somewhat less than useful. The 4E version doesn’t seem to have that problem.

Chapter 2: Races

Changelings and Kalashtar are back, and Warforged get a full write-up. The other common races each get about a half-page to show how they fit into Eberron. The backstories for the Devas and the Eladrin in particular struck me as very nicely done.

The 4E implementation of the Changeling is very close to just being a straight lift from the 4E Doppleganger, which is fine. The mechanics seem solid, and the two powers nicely reinforce the sly, deceptive possibilities of the race.

The Kalashtar are… interesting. Without the Psionic power source (coming in Player’s Handbook 3), they don’t have that synergy working for them yet. However, they do get a nice psychic defense power and telepathic communication, so the groundwork is laid. A lot of the rich Kalashtar backstory from 3E is not in this book – understandably, from the point of view of space in the book and concerns about overwhelming the reader with information. They have been given more of a “flirting with madness” vibe in this edition that I think works*.

The Warforged write-up seems pretty much a rehash of the Dragon article on playing them. Nothing really new, but nice to have it in one book.

Overall, the races section delivers the goods. I’m very satisfied with it, and delighted by one or two bits.

Chapter 3: Classes

One new class – the Artificer, of course. A pile of new paragon paths, and a smattering of epic destinies.

The Artificer was previewed as a playtest feature in Dragon some time ago. Since then, it’s undergone some substantial work, and the result is pretty good, in my opinion. As an arcane leader, it shares some design space with the Bard, but (as is common in 4E) fills the role in a way that is qualitatively different and fresh. Artificers still get to power up weapons and items with funky temporary boosts and enchantments, but now also get to build little constructs to help you with various things – including combat. This is handled using the summoning rules, and just thrills me. The idea of an Artificer tossing down a pile of sticks, metal, and crystal and then conjuring an elemental spirit into it to animate it and send it in to battle just tickles me to no end. They also get to produce a number of different conjurations and zones, making them good secondary controllers.

I’m getting happier and happier with paragon paths. At first, I didn’t like the idea that a character who hadn’t multi-classed all through heroic tier would be forced to take one, but the increasing number of choices provided in the supplements, and the broader and more interesting requirements for them, are changing my mind. For example, the Alchemist Savant paragon path has as its only requirement the ability to make alchemical items. There are also paragon paths for each of the Dragonmarks. Nice and juicy, all of them.

The epic destinies tie strongly into the ideas of the Draconic Prophesy, the Last War, the Mournland, and the Silver Flame. As such, they are very flavourful, and linked directly to some of the primary themes of the Eberron campaign world.

So, the classes chapter also gets a big thumbs-up.

Chapter 4: Character Options

Feats, equipment, and rituals here, including the extra alchemy rules and items that are so important to the feel of Eberron.

The feats are the usual mix you might expect, mainly tied to world-specific things like the new races, the nationalities, the new deities, and Dragonmarks. I was again disappointed with the Shifter** – no real love there, when I thought the Shifters and their feats were one of the most interesting things in the 3E Eberron.

Dragonmark feats deserve some special mention. They have been redesigned to grant bonuses and boosts to certain character capabilities, and to allow the marked character to master certain rituals tied to the mark. No more spell-like abilities (or powers, as they would have been in 4E), and each of the marks now has something to offer to an adventuring character. I like it.

The equipment section has a smattering of Eberron weapons, some specific pieces of gear (ID papers, inquisitive’s kit, spellshards) and Dragonmarked House services, and those alchemical rules I mentioned. These latter are a very nice supplement to the Adventurer’s Vault alchemy rules, including fun things like clockwork bombs and woundpatch. The magic items are primarily devoted to implements for the new deities, artificers, and some Dragonshard items and Warforged components.

There are 20 new rituals, as well, and while they all tie in very nicely to the themes and feel of Eberron, they are also all very applicable in other campaign worlds. This brings the official published rituals up around the 200 mark, and that makes me happy, though I still hope to see them expand into the Martial power source.

Character options gets a grudging nod, despite the fact that Shifters have once again been shafted.

Chapter 5: The World of Eberron

This section walks through the world, using it as a source of character backgrounds. It starts with the Five Nations, moves on to the rest of Khorvaire, and then expands to take in the rest of the world and other background elements such as Dragonmarked Houses and professions. It does a good job of giving a decent overview without going too much in depth on any single topic.

I would have liked to have seen them revisit the trick they used the 3E Five Nations supplement, where each nation had a sidebar with five things everyone in that nation knows. I found that a brilliant way to encapsulate the mindset of the average person of that nation, showing what they find important, and what they think about many things. The section on backgrounds in this book would have been a perfect place to do that again.

This section holds the single piece of art in the book that I think fails. The picture of Sharn on p 127 just doesn’t do it for me. Sure, we get a nice view of the towers, but the whole thing looks like a piece of wargame terrain set on a flat table. The art from the Sharn: City of Towers 3E sourcebook did a significantly better job of showing the way Sharn is really built on more Sharn, reaching down into the depths of the headland. And the floating neighbourhoods would have been nice to see.

And that’s the book. On the whole, I like it, though I think there were a couple of missed opportunities, and some things (like the Psionic nature of the Kalashtar) that are going to take future supplements to bring to fruition. But, as a start, it certainly does its job. It’s got me thinking about running a new Eberron campaign***.

*Can you tell I like Kalashtars?

**I mentioned this back here.

***No, I’m not going to do it right now. I’d have to drop something else, or convert one of the current games over to Eberron, and I don’t think the players would be happy about those options.