Great Grant!

Posted on June 1, 2008 | 1 comment

I got a batch of books at Half Price Books the other day – you can find such great stuff there. In this case, the personal memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant! I had to laugh; his very first assignment was here in Texas for the Mexican War, and he was travelling from Corpus Christi to San Antonio and thence Austin. Grant notes, “The journey was hazardous on account of Indians, and there were white men in Texas whom I would not have cared to meet in a secluded place.” Woot for violent white Texans! Scaring Yankees since 1845.

There’s nothing like reading about events from the perspective of the great men who participated in them. In many ways Grant parallels the standard “adventurer” career path! Aimless at first and ending up in the Army by no fault of his own, “levelling up” fairly quickly in rank, and ultimately deciding the fate of a nation, by force of arms and the grace of God.

Alas, his “epic destiny” was to die sick and poor; in the real world that is second only to death by violence in the most popular fates of heroes.

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Cool New Games

Posted on May 31, 2008 | Leave a comment

The buzz has been all about 4e lately. But much better are my recent RPG purchases from my FLGS, Rogue’s Gallery, here in Austin (well, Round Rock), Texas.

  • The new Mongoose Traveller. I like it, although dear lord Mongoose needs to fire their editor and layout person and get new ones. Black Industries, also in England, closed down, and theirs were top notch, maybe they’re available! It’s your layout, art, and editing that is keeping you inside the Tier 3 RPG companies; invest a little money in the products not looking like shit and you’d be in there with the big dogs. I may write a review for rpg.net, but the review already up captures most of how I feel about it.
  • Several Paizo Pathfinder Chronicles supplements – Guide to Korvosa, Classic Monsters Revisited, and the new Gazetteer of Golarion. All three are awesome. The ir game world is managing to be modern and yet distill the essence of what made settings like Greyhawk great. And Classic Monsters is perfect for any game of any D&D variant, it’s less about stats and more about making monsters less boring.
  • River into Darkness, the newest Paizo Gamemastery module. Into the Mwangi Expanse you go, in a scenario that evokes all those “up the scary jungle river” movies of yore.

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Kill the Wizard First!

Posted on May 31, 2008 | Leave a comment

The excellent blog Kill the Wizard First is wrestling with a lot of the same 4e shortcomings I am; he’s even trying to come up with fixes.   I’m not sure it’s worth the trouble, but check it out!

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4e PHB Readthrough – Chapter 4: Classes

Posted on May 31, 2008 | 12 comments

Welcome to the second installment in my read-through of the new Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition Player’s Handbook. This time, we’ll go through Chapter 4: Character Classes.

“Just one chapter!?!” you cry? Well, this one chapter is 125 pages long; the first three chapters combined were only 49 pages. It’s more than a third of the total book, and by far the meatiest. So buckle up, buttercup!

The classes in 4e are: cleric, fighter, paladin, ranger, rogue, warlock, warlord, and wizard. The venerable barbarian, druid, monk, and bard have been jettisoned and the warlock and warlord (was: marshal) have been imported from the 3e splatbooks. The sorcerer is gone too – or really, as we’ll see later, the new wizard is a sorcerer and the old wizard is dead.

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4e PHB Readthrough – Chapters 1-3

Posted on May 29, 2008 | 6 comments

As I read through the 4e PHB, I bring to you a play by play commentary. I’m trying to wipe what I already think I know and just take the book as it comes.

First Impressions. The layout is decent, though unexceptional – you’d think the RPG with the most money thrown at it would look the best. I am not sure I like the art style – it’s too “busy” for me, and all the characters look stiff or stilted, not natural. But for the record I didn’t really groove on the 3e “spiky partial pencil sketch” model either. So that’s a wash.

Chapter 1 – How to Play. Part of this chapter is the usual intro to roleplaying for newbies complete with the de rigeur “children’s game of make-believe” comparison. The couple interesting bits are “A Fantastic World,” where they set the stage for their “points of light” setting. I don’t really think D&D needed a default setting more hardcoded into its pages, but I reckon it’s not too hard to ignore it and swap it out. The other interesting part is in the description of the DM, where they’re careful not to say that the DM sets the rules. He builds the adventures, plays the monsters, and “referees” how to apply the rules when it’s unclear. That concerns me a little, the “DM is at the mercy of the rules” thing was previously limited to the pages of Knights of the Dinner Table.

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4e Hitting the Streets

Posted on May 28, 2008 | Leave a comment

Some preorders have accidentally shipped early, so 4e books are already showing up. And the core books are already available as torrents on all your favorite torrent sites. Be advised! Fly from evil!  (S. John Ross, if the phrase “fly from evil” somehow attracts your attention via the power of the Interwebs – finish the damn game!!!)

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Order of the Stick “Not Converting” to 4e

Posted on May 28, 2008 | Leave a comment

In an interesting post, Order of the Stick creator Rich Burlew says that the popular webcomic won’t be converting to 4e – kinda.  He’ll transition to making 4e jokes as they occur to him, but he’s been using rules less and story more.  And he notes that a lot of the specific fundamental shifts in core races, classes, etc. would cause too much story disruption to incorporate.  (That’s one of my 4e gripes – existing campaigns, campaign settings, etc. can only adapt with significant self-violation…)

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Another Batch of 4e Excerpts

Posted on May 28, 2008 | 2 comments

I let the new D&D Fourth Edition excerpts on the Wizards of the Coast site gather up this time since the first couple weren’t too notable.

Fallcrest is the new “default starting town” in the 4e DMG.  It’s fine, it’s a generic small town, D&D style.  I still wonder why they felt they needed to so totally cut bait with all the rich legacy of older editions.  Why not Hommlet?  Why not Saltmarsh, they revamped it and put it in the 3.5e DMG2 after all.  But, whatever.  3/5.

Rituals are the new way you cast ‘big spells’ in D&D.  Crafting magic items and raising the dead are rituals, not spells or feats.  Rituals come in scrolls and books, which work like magic scrolls and books (one use vs reusable).  Actually, as I read on – rituals have been used to replace any spell with a permanent effect, or even an effect that lasts more than a couple rounds.  Cure Disease, Detect Secret Doors, Silence, Endure Elements, Water Breathing, and Knock are now rituals, not spells.  Basically anything you wouldn’t normally cast in combat (well actually, a lot of the above I would normally cast in combat).

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Another Worthy Runelords Campaign

Posted on May 28, 2008 | Leave a comment

If you’re enjoying our Rise of the Runelords campaign session writeups, I must confess I’ve found a campaign funnier than ours -the All Goblin Runelords Campaign!  Check it out!

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First Runelords “Sins of the Saviors” Session Summary Posted

Posted on May 27, 2008 | Leave a comment

At long last, we begin Sins of the Saviors, the fifth chapter in the Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path. We have to save Sandpoint from yet another subterranean threat – did these guys look around for ancient Indian burial grounds to put their town on top of or what? Anyway, we take on a crazy and mighty high level cleric of Lamashtu and his two pet glabrezus this time. High impact! Check out the full summary:

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Spirit of the Century Review Posted

Posted on May 26, 2008 | 2 comments

In another addition to my list of well-crafted and very attractive reviews, my review of Spirit of the Century has just been posted at rpg.net.  It’s a fun game with a very clever chargen system and an interesting and innovative mechanic of using tags (in the Web sense, like the ones below) as the primary metaphor for describing and interacting with people/scenes/etc.  And, it’s OGL!  You can go see the rules in the online SRD.

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4e Excerpt: Swarms

Posted on May 24, 2008 | Leave a comment

The latest D&D 4e excerpt, swarms, doesn’t bear much comment.  It’s swarms, same as they were in 3e.  They talk a lot about their “research” and “insights,” but pretty much a swarm is the same with a 4e statblock.

They do “clarify” that you can’t bull rush a swarm, which I must say has never come up for me, because you don’t need to write down rules for things that are blazingly obvious.

The one thing I don’t like is how fast swarms move.  One of the ‘signature’ aspects of swarms in the movies is that they kinda mill about a lot and though an individual component is fast, the whole swarm doesn’t really move super fast, due to the need of staying together and just being kinda dumb.  These swarms shoot straight at someone like an arrow, eat ’em, and shoot at the next guy like an arrow, which would be fine for some special swarm but not for all of them. 3/5.

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