Chatty’s Worldwide D&D Game Day

On Saturday June 7th, FLGS around the world will celebrate the launch of 4th Edition with a Day long demo of the newest ruleset of D&D.

As I said earlier this week, I think it’s the best occasion for those who have been fervent hopefuls or downright 4e fans to share their enthusiasm by showing the game to new players.

I thought I’d take a few minutes to share a few scoop to push along those sitting on the Fence about DMing or trying the game out on that day.

I won’t spoil anything major but I will give you a few choice tidbits.

There is a never before published D&D 4e adventure called ‘Into the Shadowhaunt’ that is available for free at your FLGS if you sign up to DM”. It’s a 15 page booklet that features a short adventure hook and 4 encounters.

While it is no Story-telling adventure (it would be hypocritical to expect an intro D&D adventure to be) it isn’t a hack and slash fest either. It features a puzzle, actual choices to be made by PCs that affect the whole adventure, traps and combat challenges. All are clever and seemingly interesting and all exist in a dynamic environment.

The Battle map is made out of a photographic montage of existing D&D tiles and serves as a perfect example for DMs to use this product to build a whole dungeon.

Players get to choose between 5 pre-generated characters sheets, complete with a painted D&D miniature that players get to keep! (I also saw that each miniature has the appropriate D&D miniature card).

In fact, I believe it to be a better adventure than Keep on the Shadowfell, but then again, I’ve always preferred 5 room dungeon-types of adventures.

I expect it to last about 2-3 hours.

But that’s not all. For those who survive the adventure, there is a second part, a one encounter mini-adventure, called ‘Against the White Dragon’ (The title doesn’t leave out a lot now does it?).

This one should last another hour and showcases just how fearsome the game’s namesake critter is! (Yes, we’re talking about 1st level PCs taking on a Large Dragon… I expect it to be a very hard challenge, potentially a TPK but not for brilliant players that work well together)

Now here’s the real scoop. DMs who accept to run the adventure get to keep everything that WotC offers to run it! This means:

• Both adventures
• A double sided battlemap featuring the D&D tile dungeon on one side and a reprint of one of the Frostfell Rift Fantastic Location.
• All the monster and NPC minis (That’s 9) including an exclusive Large White Dragon (I sure can’t see it in the Dungeons of Dread checklist)!

So if you’d like to get these things and are willing to DM with strangers for one day, ask your FLGS tomorrow and get the adventure a few days in advance so you can get to read it.

However, do expect to have to deal with some anti 4e flak and a constant stream of ‘but that’s just like Warcraft’, ‘it’s just crunch and no fluff’ and other easily thrown comments like that.

While there is no doubt that 4e will be a bigger success than 3.0, this is a game that needs to be played, digested and pondered on before it gets adopted.

Being a herald for the major changes that 4e brings is not going to be an easy job, but I’m willing to take that challenge, I hope some of you will too.

In fact, I bet that I get to sell a bunch of Player’s Handbook that day. I’ll even go as far as making the pledge that I will have each of the players in my games say ‘this is so cool’ at least once… (no bet for bad faith haters!)

Wish me luck!