We were extremely fortunate to get an early copy of the upcoming D&D boxed set called The Shadowfell: Gloomwrought and Beyond to unbox and show you all today. It comes packaged in a thin box the same size as the Red Box starter set and comes with a very sturdy 127 page paperback Campaign Guide, a 31 page Encounter Book, two sheets of cardboard tokens, one poster with a map of gloomwrought on one side and an encounter map on the other, and a Despair deck of 30 cards.
The Architect DM: Give Your Cities Some Character
As with nearly every topic I cover in this series, I’ve touched on the idea of adding character to settlements and cities before but now I’d like to put it in the spotlight. Let’s face it, your players will only remember select portions of the adventures you run even on the best of days. The elements that players seem to remember the most are specifically striking elements of a few NPCs, villains, encounters, and social interactions. Generally speaking, they will not remember a location very much unless a specific element of that location ties directly to one of those elements. They may not remember a location featuring a really sweet bridge if you describe it to them, but set a dramatic encounter on that bridge and they’re much more likely to remember the details of that location.
Review: Heroes of Shadow
The book Player’s Option: Heroes of Shadow is the first real print product we have seen for 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons since the Essentials line and also marks what I hope is the end in what I perceived as a lag in print products for the game. Heroes of Shadow was delayed from March until April so that it could be printed as a hard cover book instead of a smaller format paperback, and I am very pleased with having a larger sized hardcover in my hands with 4E content in it after months without one. What this book contains is exactly what you would expect from a book focusing on player characters that tap into the shadow power source and draw their inspiration from the darker corners of your D&D universes. Its contents range from entirely new classes to new builds for existing classes to new races and more than a handful of new options for characters of all types that want to have a bit darker tilt to their abilities.
The Architect DM: On Dungeons
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the iconic “Dungeon” concept that many of us think of when we think of it in the context of Dungeons & Dragons. Also because only a month or two ago Dave wrapped up his 4E run through the Temple of Elemental Evil with custom mechanics to add to the “large dungeon crawl” feel of the adventures. Now I find my own campaign on the verge of the epic tier (the characters are currently level 19/20), and I am beginning to brainstorm a series of elemental dungeons that they will have to go through as a form of the Temple of Elemental Evil now fractured and embodied in five separate temples. Yes, I loved The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and I plan on stealing liberally from it.
The Eighth Wheel
It’s funny how things never develop how you expected. When I decided to start running a D&D game after going to DDXP this year, I was reasonably certain things would never get off the ground. I knew a couple people might be interested, but with schedules being what they are (especially with several parents in the mix, myself included), I wasn’t sure the stars would align sufficiently to get the first session of the ground – much less a multi-year-spanning campaign like we used to run back in the day.
As it turns out, I have no problems with finding players for my group. Quite the opposite, actually.
The Architect DM: How to Improvise Fantasy Buildings
In an ongoing effort to help new and experienced tabletop RPG storytellers improvise and design locations, I started by talking about urban open spaces and provided what I called a design toolbox for that purpose. In this post (and most likely several future posts) I will attempt to provide an extensive and easy to use design toolbox for “Fantasy Buildings”. What types of buildings fall into that category is not set in stone, so I invite you to comment on this post or suggest on twitter (tag me with @Bartoneus) any types of fantasy buildings that I don’t cover int his post that you think should be included in future posts on the subject.
The Architect DM: Negative Space in Dungeons
A very important design concept used in Architecture that I would like to discuss today is the concept of negative space. This topic flows naturally from the discussion in last week’s post about the open spaces in an urban setting being defined by the buildings that are placed around it. In addition I have been thinking quite a lot about the topic since seeing the post on Boing Boing about classic style D&D hand-drawn dungeon maps. If you haven’t seen those maps yet, they are indeed very classic but they are also, unfortunately not examples of good dungeon design.
Weird and Stubborn: A Tale of Omnipotence
This week, I undertake my first serious effort to run a campaign as a Dungeon Master in over 20 years of playing D&D. Will I succeed? Or will it be just like that one time when the things happened? Oh, God. The things! The THINGS! I wonder if I can just roll a Bluff check and have it work out OK in the form of a montage…….
The Architect DM: Open Spaces Design Toolbox
As I introduced in my last post about improvisation, I believe that the key to being able to design a location (whether beforehand or on the fly) is grounded in what I’m calling your toolbox for design. The key is that once you have a well developed toolbox to pull ideas from, you can more readily and quickly design a location for your tabletop Roleplaying Games on the spot or adapt your planned locations to fit the developing needs of the game table. An underlying goal of this series of posts is to help you develop the toolbox required so that you will be able to accomplish this task with relative ease and a good amount of confidence.
The Architect DM: On Improvisation
I could not be happier for February to be here because it means winter is getting closer to ending and with it hopefully the seemingly annual lull in gaming activities. There was an unintentional break from my regular D&D campaign from late November until the very end of January due to weather and horrible holiday scheduling conflicts. Last year I somehow managed to go from thinking about canceling my campaign in early December to running three full adventures within January alone. Thankfully my game got back into the swing of things two weeks ago and now I am gearing up for another adventure this weekend. As I’m getting back into planning my adventures, I’ve been thinking more and more about improvisation in tabletop RPGs.
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