I sold this poster (briefly, until my small stock ran out) at the Gygax Memorial Fund booth at GenCon. It contains the rules you need to generate dungeon and wilderness random encounters, and it’s lavishly, possibly even maniacally, illustrated.
OD&D monsters (click to enlarge)
Don’t get too excited about WOTC’s support of older D&D versions, which they sorta-kinda announced at Gen Con. Rory put the pieces together:
Our guess is that that’s how older-edition support will be done – subscriptions will be sold for Al-Qadim bookshelves, Dragonlance bookshelves, etc. If that’s true, it’s not quite as exciting as it could be.
My first Gen Con was just as overwhelming as people said it would be. Now that I’m home, I can actually decide how I felt about everything.
Walking around the convention floor, I heard a little kid say to his dad, “This is a dream come true!” I clearly wasn’t having as great a time as that kid, but I think my first con went about as well as I could have hoped. Next March: GaryCon?
Here I am in the D&D product seminar. Hosting are Mike Mearls, James Wyatt, and Rodney Thompson. James is talking novels, Rodney tabletop, and Mike RPG.
NOVELS
Neverwinter: Gauntlgrym, Neverwinter. Charon’s Claw next year.
Abyssal Plague, Gates of Madness, Mark of Nerath, Temple of the Yellow Skulls, Oath of Vigilance, Eye of the Chained God, Sword of the Gods, Under the Crimson Sun, Shadowbane (only as an ebook).
Ebooks: they’re releasing three backlist books per week. The latest was Salvatore’s Cleric’s Quintet.
BOARD GAMES
They had a game called Dungeon of Dread that they cancelled. Based on playtests it wasn’t good enough to release.
They are releasing a new game next year: “Lords of Waterdeep”. It’s a Euro style game where you send adventurers on quests and try to rule the city. Coming in March 2003. Volos Guide to Waterdeep was used as a source.
ROLEPLAYING LINE
At the con: lots of Neverwinter stuff. Neverwinter fortune cards. Lost Crown of Neverwinter encounters. Game Day: Gates of Neverdeath. Neverwinter campaign setting book.
Lair Assault, a new form of organized play in September. Combat puzzle aspect. you build your own character. The DM has a menu of monsters he can place, so he can try to make it as difficult as he can. Each time you play it can be different. It’s adversarial, for power gamers. The first Lair Assault is Forge of the Dawn Titan. The second adventure is pirate themed [but i missed the name]. The third is Explore the Talon Claw [I think] and involves defending an island against dinosaur attacks.
The book contains a new pc race that can fly. what fey race could that be?
Also contains a new barbarian build. dual role. Striker when raging, defender when not raging.
Q AND A
If there are any major changes to the game you can’t surprise people. Mearls worries that fourth ed lectured people about how they should play. He wants to have a dialogue, not dictate. wants to regain trust.
FINAL ANNOUNCEMENT
Miniatures line redesigned. Turns out that roleplaying gamers don’t like randomized miniatures. (applause) Product coming out next year: noncollectible minis in themed sets.
Creating a new minis boardgame that uses warbands based on these new minis sets. Tactical diceless game that uses action cards. Some luck based on what cards you draw. Uses dungeon tiles that interlock with puzzle edges. 8 by 8 tiles. Minis sets will come with their own action cards. some new sculpts, some old.
There will be a public open playtest of the minis rules, well in advance, where you can print out cards and try out the game. You don’t have to be a ddi subscriber to do the free playtest. From now on if we try something new we want to start trying open playtests.
Gail Gygax and I have been sitting in the Gygax Memorial Fund booth at Gencon, fundraising and selling a lot of copies of Cheers, Gary, the book I edited. Yesterday we didn’t have all our supplies yet, and sold out of our boxful of copies in the first hour, and had to put people on a mailing list for the rest of the day. Today we had more books on hand. Gail and I have been autographing copies. The fact that anyone is walking away with my autograph continues to be hilarious to me.
The ENNies are going on right now. I hear that at the
ENnies auction, a copy of Cheers, Gary is going for five hundred dollars so far. I’m glad that people are using this way to donate to the Gygax Memorial Foundation.
After Gencon, I’ll put up a link to the book for sale on the Foundation website.
Edit: Tomorrow Rory and I are planning to go to the D&D
Product preview, so expect a post around 11am or earlier.
Four Wizards design/development people were on hand to answer questions and preview upcoming Dragon content.
From their upcoming content slideshow:
Sep-Oct: Kara Tur
Nov-Dec: Dragon support for Heroes of the Feywild
Jan-Feb – Forgotten Realms
The second part of the seminar was a general QA, in which we learned the following:
Website
Upcoming products:
General Questions
In AD&D, where your treasure haul is limited by encumbrance, you need a way to increase encumbrance limits along with treasure hauls. Therefore there are 4 types of bags of holding in the AD&D DMG, with capacities of 250, 500, 1000, and 1500 pounds. In 4e, there is no assumption that weight limits for treasure will be a regular part of gameplay. Therefore, bags of holding need some other, more 4e-friendly ways to level up.
While some items may get mechanically better (for instance, a +1 sword becomes a +2 sword), it’s more challenging to improve items that don’t have numeric bonuses. I thought I’d go through the Wondrous Items in the 4e Player’s Handbook and give examples of how each could gain powers that reflect their history.
Pockets of Holding This bag of holding can be cut according to a specific eldritch pattern and sewn as pockets into six garments. Each pocket allows access to the same shared bag of holding.
The Pockets of Holding pattern was invented by an honorable adventuring party who wanted to share their healing potions, but later misused by a band of dwarven thieves who discovered their shoplifting applications.
Self-Holding Bag: The bag of holding-boosting ritual from Dragon 385 could as easily be a leveled magic item. This bag can be hidden in or removed from an extradimensional space as a minor action.
Seleris the Magician’s Bag of Holding
If you put one hand in the bag of holding (a minor action) you can transfer items from your other hand to the bag and vice versa as a free action.
Seleris the Magician used to put one hand in his pocket while doing conjuring tricks with his other hand. Due to his Bag of Holding and other magical trinkets, he developed a great reputation as a wizard without ever learning a single spell.
A rickety cart, drawn by a miserable old skeleton of a horse, and surrounded by mounted guards, was slowly advancing through the dense throng towards the scaffold.
This passage from Theophile Gautier’s Captain Fracasse is the leadup towards the usual escape-from-the-gallows scene that appears in a lot of adventure novels. It’s a pretty unremarkable passage, except if you take one of the adjectives literally: What if it really is a SKELETAL HORSE? That is a bizarrely scary way to be carted to the gallows.
And that’s enough D&D inspiration from classy 19th-century novels. Next week: R. A. Salvatore!!
A PC wants to jump 10 feet in the air without a running start? No problem. Just look up the difficulty in the Player’s Handbook or Rules Compendium.
DC 10?
A PC wants to “sell” a random traveling merchant the equivalent of the Brooklyn Bridge in your game world for a mere 20,000 gold pieces? Ummm… That’s a difficult DC, right?
Skill DCs can be tough to decide on the fly. Sometimes a difficult DC doesn’t seem to cut it for the crazy thing a PC wants to try, and sometimes you’ll notice DC inflation as you constantly make every skill check high difficulty to challenge highly skilled PCs. How does one navigate the harrowing minefield of skill DCs? Never fear; I will tell you!
Easy DCs: I often look at these as the consolation prize for what would otherwise be a failed check. Example: you ask me what you know about Minotaurs. I have you roll a knowledge check. You roll poorly but still make an easy DC. I tell you common knowledge about minotaurs; they are horned humanoid bull-like creatures that can sometimes be found roaming mazes. So basically, your character gets to know what an average player might know (or a little less) and you save yourself from complete embarrassment.
Other than that, I save easy DCs for rolls that should only be interesting if you roll really low on them. Things like tricking a child (hilarious if you fail) or securing a meeting with the head of the thieves guild (raise suspicion or get into a fight on a failure). Heroes shouldn’t routinely find these things difficult so higher DCs aren’t appropriate, but it can make a memorable session if you roll a 1 or 2 on one of these rolls and get yourself into more trouble.
I should note that I do not use easy DCs for group skill checks, even though this is recommended by the rules. Requiring only half of PCs to succeed on these checks for overall success makes these challenges easy enough; they don’t need to be easy DCs on top of that. I determine the DCs for group checks like any other DC, but I do keep the rule for requiring only half the PCs to succeed. Read the rest of this entry »
