Yet More GenCon Stuff

While this is mostly a blog about gaming, it is occasionally also a blog about me. And around travel time, it also becomes a blog about travel. This is one of the posts that is mostly about me and mostly not about gaming and a little bit about travel.

I don't really have normal relationships. At least, I don't have normal relationships if you consider a heterosexual, monogamous relationship the norm. I have, at present, two girlfriends. Those girlfriends are each seeing people that are not me. Autumnblade is seeing a lovely young lady from our weekly D&D campaign, and Bloodsong is seeing one of my co-workers and a business contact of mine she met through me. We all know about one another. We all approve of this style of relationship, and with one another's choices in partners. Google "polyamory." That's what we're up to.

That isn't to say that everything is always lovely all the time. There's drama, and it can be really tough to work through. Anything you do that involves more than one person's feelings runs the risk of being difficult. Any time you add more people to that mix, it gets exponentially more difficult. I'm serious when I say "exponentially," as well; it isn't a case of one person bringing enough drama for one person. Each new romantic relationship brings with it a new non-romantic relationship with every other person in the group. Things get sort of crazy sometimes.

But it comes with the territory, and everyone is generally in agreement that the good heavily outweighs the bad most of the time, and we struggle on like any other relationship or network of relationships might. Think of it sort of like an extended group of friends who occasionally sleep together.

This year, I'm bringing both of my girlfriends to GenCon. That's sort of like saying "I'm bringing two snarling wildcats to sit with me in a phone booth for three hours!" There's a lot of potential for things to go horribly, horribly wrong with this trip. I'm confident it's going to be alright, mind, the above comparison isn't meant to convey that they hate one another or that they're at one another's throats. I've met some very lovely snarling wildcats. But there is certainly the potential that everyone and everything in the direct vicinity is going to get mauled, I'm not ignorant of that fact.

So this is going to be something of a strange trip. Autumnblade is a fairly avid gamer, and has the entire weekend planned out. There have been a few moments where she's looked at me and said something akin to "Then, at midnight, I get to stop for a snack!" I'm not even really sure how much I'll see of her. Bloodsong's new to gaming as a hobby, and plans to mostly check out every single game in the exhibition hall and try out whatever anyone is playing near her. Honestly, I envy her a little, in that she is going to be exposed to so many games in one of the most incredible environments possible. If she doesn't like the game she's playing, she can stop, turn around, and start playing a completely different game at the drop of a hat.

I'll likely spend a lot of time in the exhibition hall myself, but more for buying purposes than anything else. The events I'm most keen on attending are seminars. There are a lot of cool talks going on this year, and I'm really excited to learn a thing or two about my various hobbies (and my business). I'm part of the Trade Day program this year, which is something I'd pushed for in my first trip, but the bosses were pretty solid that that first go-round was not to be a working holiday. I think they've figured out that I breathe this shit, though, and have stopped trying to pursuade me from working on my days off (I have been known to come into work occasionally just because I'm bored).

About the only gaming event I'm absolutely taking part in is the Yu-Gi-Oh! Championship Series. That might seem a touch strange, given my dislike of the game, but it's for a good cause.

I will be trolling.

I have built a deck that is older than God, and have every intention of having some kid look at me like I have a screw loose when I play it. A few kids, in fact. I will be wasting a good portion of my day fucking with Yu-Gi-Oh! kids. It will be very lol. I am considering blogging about it live. Maybe live-tweeting. If I can, with pictures of my opponent's faces when I lay down a card they haven't seen since people considered Hammer Pants a viable fashion choice and the Y2K bug was going to doom the planet. Yes, that's right, I'm playing Toons.

I also plan on buying things and doing some business networking. But the YGO game is going to be the highlight of the trip, I'm sure.

What Wizards is Doing Wrong, Part 86x10²³³

We all love to rag on Wizards of the Coast for fucking up our amazingly wonderful awesome incredible game. And to be fair, they fuck up a fair bit. Not enough that they’ve gone out of business, mind, but enough that they’re hurting us, and enough that they’re hurting their market share. According to ICv2 (which is brilliant), the good folks at Paizo are a close second in the role-playing game market, and they’re selling a game that Wizards of the Coast invented. Anyone looking at this should be able to understand the problem pretty quickly: Paizo is making nearly all of its money off of an intellectual property developed by their direct competitors, and they’re doing it legally, and it’s eating a healthy stack of Wizards’ lunch.

Most of the time, I don’t give business advice to the folks at Wizards of the Coast, because they’re supposed to know what the fuck they’re doing. These are some smart folk, the best and brightest that the gaming world has to offer. They’re supposed to understand that there is a very simple solution to this problem: they need to sell what Paizo is selling, and they can make more money selling it than Paizo can.

Back when 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons came out, a lot of people were pissed off that the company was replacing the best role-playing game in the world with some new, weird thing. They complained and they argued and there were some solid edition wars going on, but eventually most of the 2nd Edition folks came around to the new way of doing things. Why? Because they had no choice. It was getting harder and harder to find Dungeons & Dragons material for the edition they liked the best, and this new version was still Dungeons & Dragons, right?

This Edition War has a different flavor, though. There’s a new factor, and that factor is that you can still find material for the version of D&D you like better. You can still find 3rd Edition support from the folks at Paizo and their allies, and that means that the grognards of 3rd don’t need to eventually filter over to D&D4. I think what Wizards was hoping for was that the Dungeons & Dragons name would carry through for them, that people would rather play “Dungeons & Dragons” than “Pathfinder.” And to a degree, they’re right. I get a lot of waffling in my store. I have a set of the three core rule books for 3.5 sitting on my shelf, and it’s priced at a whopping $275. I don’t think I’m going to get that much for it. Yet. But eventually someone is going to come down to my store hoping to find some D&D3.5 core books, and I’ll say “Well, there’s Pathfinder over here…” And they’ll let me know that $275 is a steal for the Dungeons & Dragons name on the edition of the book they’re looking for. But a lot of people walk away, think about it, talk to their gaming buddies, and decide that they’d rather pick up Pathfinder than 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. The name means something, but if it’s the same product in a different wrapper, a lot of folks are going to buy. If it’s the same wrapper around a new, different product, they’re not so sure. Obviously, this is doing Paizo fairly well.

If Wizards wants to capitalize on this shitty situation, the solution is pretty simple. They need to open up their backlist. They need to put the entire collection of 3.5 D&D books on the idevice book apps for a dollar a piece. They need to print black-and-white perfect bound versions of the core books and put them back in circulation at a much lower price point than Pathfinder’s core book (say $25; it works for Palladium). They need to put 2nd Edition and 1rst Edition books up as .pdf files for free, and run that site on advertising packages. The most expensive part of making 3.5 D&D is paid for; all Wizards needs to pay for right now is reprinting and inventory, and both of those things are super-cheap compared to the loss of market share Paizo is currently representing.

Then they need to change how they’re doing 4th Edition entirely. Their focus is currently divided between online content and published content, and that hasn’t been doing them any favors. My coworker Ian and I were discussing the myriad ways Exalted and White Wolf have been sucking donkey balls for the past few years, and one of the ideas he put forth sort of struck home with me. Wizards of the Coast needs to put out two different versions of Dungeons & Dragons. On one side, they need printed product to support their organized play initiatives and to get most of their new playerbase involved. People become involved with D&D because someone passes them a book and says ‘This shit’s great, let’s give it a go.’ People need to have a thing in their hand before they become properly invested in the product you’re selling.

But Dungeons & Dragons isn’t a product as much as it’s an idea. It’s information, and if nothing else has been proven in the last few years of gaming, it’s a fluid idea. It’s a living idea, and the print medium is not best suited to that sort of document. Wizards should by all means continue to publish print books, but only the print books that fucking matter. Core rule-books. Setting information. Monsters. Things you need to sit down and play with your friends for a few hours.

Then they need to publish the most comprehensive online role-playing game experience ever attempted. They need to build the Google+ of role-playing games: huge online database with every word of every book, organized, searchable, integrated with a new character builder, an adventure designer, a monster-builder. Every power, every character, every dungeon tile, every sentence, all living in the cloud. The game’s errata occurs immediately. Characters are updated as the rules are. Player-built content lives side-by-side with official data so that every player can draw from every other player that uses this new set of tools. Online chat with video and audio capabilities, as well as an online table built in java allow for online play. Charge us more money for an actually robust online game, and we will gladly fucking pay it.

What problems does this solve? It means that product printed a year ago isn’t out-dated, it’s just the introductory product and it doesn’t represent the game as a whole. It means that errata can happen at the drop of a hat when something is proven to be broken. It means that you no longer have to pay scads of cash to publish high-quality book when you can pay less money by far to have a game that constantly reproduces itself, constantly updates itself, and never goes out of print. It means you stop having to deal with distributors, because you can send the logins that grant you access to this new and wonderful game to the same people running the D&D Encounters and D&D Dungeon Delve initiatives (which means that people who don’t have credit cards can still buy and enjoy your online offerings). It means you make more money, you spend less money, you increase your market share substantially, you make a lot of players much, much happier with you, you stop dividing your attention between print and online media, and you have improved the public opinion of your company with a huge division of the folks who currently hate you.

If someone at Wizards would like to hire me to fix their busted shit, they can reach me at friggert@hotmail.com. I’m not cheap.

D&D Confessions

This one was a little too long for twitter, so it turned into a blog post instead.
When I first started laying Dungeons & Dragons, I was doing it wrong. This lasted for a really, really long time. Well into my high school years, and I started playing between grades three and four. See, my buddy Landon had this awesome box of stuff he’d discovered at a cousin’s place, and he brought it over one day, and it was basically the best thing I’d ever seen. It was the Red Box of D&D, and it literally changed my life. From that moment on, I was playing D&D.
Except that I wasn’t playing D&D. The version of the Red Box that we’d gotten our hands on had a rolodex of cards that taught you the rules (which is, by the by, completely ingenious, and why people aren’t using it as a method to teach games today is completely beyond me). So one of the cards would have stuff like “Climbing a Wall:” writ huge on the header, and then it would go into the rules for climbing and falling and ability checks and the like. And we were missing some cards. Also, we were eight years old, so we ended up reading all sorts of ridiculous bullshit into the rules. Eight year olds are not masters of literal reading.
So what we ended up playing was some insane amalgamation of the make-believe games all kids play (“Okay, so this GI Joe is going to be the big bad villain, and this group of lego guys is a bunch of dwarves. And they’ve kidnapped this princess that we… stole from your sister? Yeah. Okay. And then we’re gonna come in and kick their butts!”) with some of the rules of D&D haphazardly tossed over them. I think the one thing that we really took from D&D was the idea of dice as a way to mediate dispute. Whenever one of us would try to do a thing that we weren’t sure we could do, we’d toss some dice and see how it went.
I played this version of Dungeons & Dragons until Landon moved to Calgary in the mid-nineties. Then I tried to teach other people the only version of D&D I knew how to play, because it was a game that I wasn’t about to give up on.
It actually took a group of Palladium Fantasy players to straighten me out, and show me how other people played role-playing games. It was an eye-opening experience for me; it showed me exactly what I’d been trying to do, refined to a story-telling art. It was, again, life-changing.
Anyway. Out of all of my D&D Confessions, the fact that I played it all wrong for some seven years is probably the most personal and embarrassing. ^_^

Playing an NPC

One of the cool things about being involved in as many gamer circles as I am is that I get to occasionally drop in on someone’s game and play a single session or three, usually as a fill-in. I get invited a fair bit, but I only ever make it out to a few games, as my schedule is usually pretty ridiculous.
Being a drop-in character in a long-running campaign is different from playing a character from the beginning, or joining full-time. You aren’t there to play a character, really – at least not in the traditional sense. You’re there to fill a gap, or to make something happen, or sometimes both. In a lot of ways, you are a glorified NPC, an extension of the Game Master’s will. There are almost always plans for you.
So when I come into a situation where I might be filling in a gap, the first thing I do is put my Game Master hat on. I come up with some ideas about who or what the character I’ll be playing is, and how that is going to work into the overarching plot of the game. Sometimes that’s as simple as “My players need a healer for a few sessions while Jenny’s moving into her new place,” sometimes it’s as complicated as “I need someone who is not me to steer the group in a political direction that is better suited to the complete dissolution of the current regime in favor of one that is strongly detrimental to the player characters.” I treat the former like I’m a player. I treat the latter like a special sort of Game Mastering in Miniature.
One of the biggest benefits to this, I find, is that a fellow Game Master brings something new to the table, a perspective you don’t have. In my case, I bring a lot of plot. No character I create lacks a backstory. No character I create lacks goals or aspirations, and that can often change the dynamic of the table drastically. When my goals and the goals of the other player characters don’t exactly match up, all the better for the dramatic tension it causes. Then, when things hit a peak, I leave and let the Game Master figure out what happens next.
Where this helps other game masters is in the flexibility it offers. If one of the players sitting at your table is pulling the party towards a specific direction, the rest of the players aren’t going to jump down the Game Master’s throat for rail-roading. A lot of times, I’ve come up with the direction entirely on my own, or with minimal direction from the Game Master, which gives me a lot of flexibility in how I get that plot point to work. It also means that I can surprise the Game Master with a point of view he or she hasn’t considered previously, a plot point that might not work in any situation except as initiated by a player-character, or a situation that is much more dramatic because of the tension that comes from interacting with another person playing a single character.
It can also be a lot of fun, plotting and planning things that the other players may or may not expect. I’m looking forward to sitting in on a few sessions of Siobhan’s Changeling game, for instance, mostly because I don’t think anyone has any clue what it is they’re dealing with, and it has the potential to change the political landscape of the game forever.

Testing, Testing

This is mostly just a test-post to see how quickly the aggregator works on the new Warp One website. I am hoping it is faster than the old one. ^_^ I deleted the post once already, but it didn’t change in the feed thing at all, so I’m putting it back up.

In other news, you should go to www.warpcomics.com and lavish me with praise for putting that shit together in my spare time for nothing but the satisfaction of a job well done. And praise. I’m also doing it for praise.

Have a picture of a pony:

On the Subject of Passports

I usually write a lot of blog posts while I’m travelling, because I consider travel to be one of the few adventures left to the suburbanite masses. If you want to go to a place, there’s a way to get there. If you want to go on a quest, someone’s got your hook-up. If you want to stab a dragon in the face, there’s a tour for that somewhere.
So when I travel, and I see things I’ve never seen before, I figure “Hey, maybe Tim in Cedar City Utah has never seen this before either.” I mean, everything I’ve seen, someone else has seen. But not everyone has seen all of the things I’ve seen, so there’s still someone who’s interested.
I’m not going to be travelling for another month or so, and when I do it will be back to Indianapolis, Indiana for GenCon. I’ll be taking much more comprehensive notes this time around, but it’s still not going to be nearly as impressive for adventure notes as, say, going to Amsterdam, Paris and London, or spending eight days living on seas.
My friend Zak, though, is supposed to be in Kenya right now. He’s not in Kenya, though. He’s in Edmonton, which is about as different from Kenya as a place can get. He forgot to renew his passport, which sort of got me to thinking about the passport as a thing.

To be honest, I’ve never really liked the idea of a passport; that I need to pay the nation of my birth for a piece of paper that says I’m allowed to leave it seems strangely restricting to me. I mean, in a free country, shouldn’t I be free to leave whenever I damned well please? But I have one. I’ve had a total of two in my lifetime, and the current is sitting in my filing cabinet as I write this.

There have been a few different sorts of passports in history. The first recognizable passport was given to Nehemiah by Artaxerxes I, the King of Persia in some 450 BCE. It was a letter requesting safe passage from the “governors beyond the river,” as Nehemiah travelled through their lands. The second was actually a tax receipt, proof that you had paid your taxes and had thus earned the right to travel to different regions of the Caliphate. King Henry V invented the first passport we might understand today as a way to help his people identify themselves overseas.

The first is sort of what one thinks about when we think “Passports and Adventures.” You are given a writ of passage by the king of a nation to travel across the lands of savages to rebuild a holy city and repopulate it with the chosen people of the gods. That’s a hell of a quest. The writ of passage is a fine way to manage passports in general, as it provides some level of legitimacy to one’s claims as a person on a quest given by someone important and/or awesome. It’s also almost-built-in railroading for your players, as they only have permission to be travelling out here for the sake of their ultimate quest.

That’s not the only way to use passports to restrict your players’ movement, though.

The medieval European passport didn’t work the same way ours do. Normally, it would be a document written up by the local authorities that would dictate which towns a person could go to or through overland. In a lot of ways, it didn’t just restrict the towns you could go to, but the path you could take to get where you’re going. If you need to get from Paris to Brussels, there are a few ways you can do that. The fastest of them crosses through seven different cities. What if one of those cities isn’t on your passport? Well, you’re not going through that town. Pick a different path. Sea ports, which were seen as a free trading zone, didn’t really suffer the same restrictions. You could go wherever you wanted by sea, but overland you’d need to get yourself permission.

This flies in the face of how things are done in a standard game of Dungeons & Dragons. I mean, travel documents rarely come up at all, and when they do, it’s usually for special occasions. You’re crossing the border into dangerous territory or something, not just travelling to the next town to kill some goblins. You don’t have to make nice with the local sheriff if you don’t want to because you can totally kick his ass, steal his girl, and make a pile of rubble out of his home. But if the next-town-over will only accept a passport as written by him or his...

And restrictions make for interesting play situations. If you can’t get a passport to the next town over, but there’s a vampire in there, and he’s killing people to death, you’ve got to make a choice: rush in and save the town anyway (probably having to break in, because the guys at the gate aren’t going to be opening the door), or sit on your hands while people are getting slaughtered - and the gold stolen, for those folks of an evil or selfish persuasion. If you need to get to Dunbastion, and the fastest road is through Gramerthay, but you can’t go through Gramerthay, you’re going to have to find a way around the city with the thieves and the rapers and such that live outside the city walls.

And if, by some circumstance, you forget to renew your passport before you leave, well then you’ve got a whole slew of problems that need fixing.

Prepping for GenCon

The last time I went to GenCon was in 2008, and it was a blast. I ended up bunking with Amber and Jason Scott, who are both the loveliest of people, and because it was my first time at the convention, I basically wandered around like an idiot and hit up as many interesting things as I could find. I did not, strangely enough, play any games. Well, that's not true, I played Katamari Damacy, which may be the worst thing a person going to GenCon should ever admit.

I did go to a lot of interesting seminars, though, and I think that's going to be my focus this time around, too. I can't really see myself joining any convention RPG tables; organizing short-term game events is sort of my job. Instead, I'm going to do a lot of seminars, learn as much as I can about as much as I can, and maybe invent a boffer sword with which to hit people in the store.

Both of my girlfriends are coming along this year, though. That sort of changes the game plan a bit, in that I'm not going to be quite as footloose and fancy-free as I was the last time around. I'm going to need to know where I am occasionally, and how to get to some places, and how to make my way from those places to where I'm supposed to be. That's going to take a bit more preparation than I'm used to. So there are a few things I'm going to need to figure out when I get to Indianapolis.

1) I'm buying a crappy cell-phone. A local one. I didn't have a way to get in touch with anyone last time around, and while that wasn't a huge problem, it will be this time. I'll be buying my crappy phone in Indianapolis at a 7/11. I will be leaving it there.

2) I'm going to sit down and actually map out some important shit in Indianapolis. Like where the cheap-ass restaurants are, the various halls, that sort of thing. They give you a map when you get into the con, and that map is pretty useful. I may end up scanning it, or getting a digital copy of it, and putting it onto my ipad.

3) Oh yeah, I'm bringing my ipad. There are few pieces of technology I love more than I love my ipad, and it is going to be something of a lifesaver next month. It's got an on-board scheduler. It's got a to-do list on it. It's got text-editing software so that I can take notes. It's got a doodling app so I that I can take notes FAST. And when I need REALLY fast notes, it's got an audio recorder. It's got maps on it. It's got an internet on it. It's like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy lives in my satchel.

4) I'm planning ahead some. I know I missed out on some killer stuff last year because I was asleep for it. I didn't sleep through the whole show or anything, but I definitely did not make as great a showing at the seminars as I was hoping. I never made it out to the Fantasy Flight party. I didn't make it to the charity auction. So there are some things I'm going to get to, and I'm going to plan ahead to make sure I get to them.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head. I'm sure I'll think of more awesome things that will help me prepare later. After all, I've got a month. ^_^

I haven't posted in ages. I'm aware of this. I am stressed out with real-life job things, and I'm playing the Wakfu Beta. This has taken up almost all of my time.

I'm going to Cuba in three days, and I will be staying there for a week. While I am there, I am going to catch up on some of my reading, some of my writing, and see what happens from there. Your almost-but-not-quite-fourthcore programming will resume after the break.

Encountering D&D: New Season Woos!

Ah, the first encounter of a new season. This is always fun for me: I get to see some new faces as the season starts, because people want to jump on when they're on the ground-floor; we get our first look at the new designer and get to make some judgements about the adventure path as a whole; we get to see what sorts of innovations are being brought to bear this season, and whether or not they work in the game's favor or against it... The whole initiative has been sort of trial-and-error for this first year; we had a solid showing in the first season with Undermountain bringing us some cool new ideas for how to run Skill Challenges and doing something the-same-but-different. We had a huge hiccough with Dark Sun, and a redemption of the initiative with Chris Sims taking the helm. I don't know Rodney Thompson, but he's done a lot of work with Star Wars over the years, and has had a hand in d20 Modern and Future. All of these are products I've never really played with, but recognize the quality of. I own a copy of the Star Wars Saga book, specifically because I wanted to take a look at the design elements that would be transitioning to D&D 4. I'm reserving the right to moderate optimism.

The Adventure Book for this season is just one huge book, instead of chunk books like last season. I consider this a step in the right direction, and wouldn't at all mind seeing more products like this in the future. It makes this set easier to give away when the season is done (we don't sell the adventure books; we get them for free, and give them away for the same). The first few sections are familiar to anyone who has done some Game Mastery for D&D Encounters in previous seasons. You get a breakdown of how Encounters works, and a n overview of the adventure as a whole; it tells you how to deal with Renown Points (something I forget about consistently), and notes on advancement and treasure.

The stuff that's new is in the Advancement, Treasure, and Fortune Cards.

As a bit of a departure from the way D&D:E has been handling Advancement in previous seasons, this time around you will actually need to keep track of your experience points. You will not level automatically at the beginning of each chapter; if you come in at the middle of chapter three, you will be starting as a level one character. I'm not sure what this is in response to, but I think it's a general improvement. It rewards the players who show up every week, and provides a bit of a slap on the wrist for those players who choose to show up only occasionally (or just the once).

I've been giving out random treasure since I started my home campaign. Admittedly, the table they've come up with for D&D:E is way better than the system I'm using at home (and I may actually just come up with a different version of it for Bones). I like that the GM doesn't really know what the party is going to loot off of BGuy #13, and I like that players get to customize their characters a bit within the preset limits of the adventure. Also, I've already jacked the roll for one packet rather than give out one piece of a packet per person, I'm just having one of the player characters roll once or twice and passing out that much stuff; the resulting fights have been pretty great. ^_^

I've already said my piece on Fortune Cards in a previous Encountering D&D; I don't think the product works the way that the good folks at Wizards of the Coast imagined they would work, I don't think they were integrated well with the game as it was designed, and I dislike that they're being pushed into the D&D: Encounters initiative. They seem rushed and a bit under-play-tested, and I would have preferred to wait an extra season for a more fully-fleshed out product.

The Encounter

The first session actually takes place over a few days. During the preview talks at DDXP, the guys at WotC were talking about how the Encounters would make a lot more use of time, and occasionally months would pass between chapters. Having spent a looooooooooong time doing extended campaigns, I can honestly say this is something that rarely crosses my mind. D&D can be a day-by-day account of the lives of the player characters, and often is. Taking some time out for a breather, or having entire days go by during a session can be an interesting way to show that your characters aren't busy all day every day, they actually get some down-time in.

The set up is pretty standard Fantasy Adventure Fare. A call has gone out to adventurous souls to build a new settlement southeast of Hammerfast (go read the Hammerfast book, I guess...). They've been offered a small stipend to help build their homes, and it is assumed that each player character has a reason for wanting to leave the comfortable confines of civilization for the wilds. The town is to be built on the bones of old Castle Inverness, recently rediscovered by a group of rangers. The new town is to serve as a waypoint between Hammerfast and Harkenwold. There is an argument about fording a stream up ahead that the players can help mediate (and choosing one side or the other will effect later encounters). Then you fight stirges.

Session Theft

There are a couple of cool things you can steal from this encounter for use in your home games. The first and probably most important is how protecting the caravan is worked into the encounter itself. The horses can be saved by a standard action terrain power (terrain powers, by the by, fucking great; more after the break), but it's a standard action and you need to be within five squares of a horse to make it go away. It saves both the horse and the wagon, necessitating that the players split up, some saving the caravan, others killing stirges dead. Little challenges like this make encounters harder to beat, while at the same time adding a new layer of interactions to the game, keeping it from being "just another fight."

Terrain powers are a thing we've seen before, but they're pretty sweet and I love when they're incorporated into a scenario. I rarely, if ever, use them in my home games, but this one has made it pretty clear that I should be more often. I mean, it doesn't have to be horses; using a variety of terrain powers to maneuver a boat or use a keep's natural defenses (ballista! whatup!) can mean the difference between a humdrum encounter and a kick-ass fight with all sorts of weird shit going on because of the place you're fighting in. You want people swinging off of chandeliers and shit? Great, put the power in there, and make it a good one (treated as a charge, Dex+2 vs Ref, 3[w] damage). You'd prefer the slide-down-the-bar, head-in-the-wall bar brawl cliche? We can make that happen (Str vs Fort, 1d6+str+[2X] and you and the target slide X squares, where X is the number of squares from your starting position to the wall).

The last cool thing about this encounter that you should probably steal for your campaign actually takes a fair bit more forethought than most of my D&D planning does. I don't usually plan more than a day ahead of time, and when I come back to a theme, I decide what the repercussions of the party's actions are going to be, and roll with it. I don't pre-plan beyond that, so making something that happens one week effect the next week's encounter directly can be a bit of a chore if you GM like I do.

It is still a thing you should be looking at, especially if you don't GM like I do. If you plan things out, if you build your adventures well ahead of time, having branching paths is pretty much a necessity if you don't want to be Railroad Guy. We get it when we're talking about directions in a dungeon (if you go into this room, this monster is going to kill you; this other room has a totally different kill-you monster), but it so rarely enters the planning stages for non-dungeon planning. The fact that this takes place on a role-playing point makes it even more important for your home campaigns; sometimes the stuff that happens around before and/or after an encounter is more important to the encounter than the encounter itself is. If you go one way, the chance of you getting attacked by Goblins goes up, but your chances of getting attacked by Crocodiles goes down. So the encounter after this one is pretty much determined by what you decide to do this session, which is pretty dope for an encounter made for in-store play.

Bestiary of Badassery: The Vile Darkness

Before You Read Further:
Abuse is not a game. It is the most horrifying and terrible thing a person can have inflicted upon them, and real-life heroes are fighting against it every day. I do not mean any disrespect at all to the victims of abuse or the forces that are doing everything humanly possible to make it stop.
Because I believe in acting locally, if you’d like to make a donation to an association against abuse, I’d suggest you head over to WIN House. They do good work, and can always use more help.
Also, while some of the abusers below are presented as victims of a horrible monster, we should never lose sight of the fact that the real victims are the abused. My heart goes out to them, and they are in my prayers.

The Vile Darkness

There is a monster that lives in the cellar of the el’Harr farm down the road a ways from Hammerfast. The only one that knows it’s there is little Alphonse, the youngest of the el’Harr’s children; he has tried to bring it to his parents’ attention, but you know how people can be about the monsters their kids talk about. Besides, no one’s ever seen it, so it’s all in the kid’s head, right?
At night, the monster whispers things to Cody el’Harr, things that shouldn’t be whispered by any good soul to another. Cody can’t see the thing, or even hear it, really. It speaks to his mind, and the dark places in his heart.
Alphonse is bruised betimes, and he’s a quiet lad. Walks with a limp since the incident in the barn a few years back, but it hasn’t slowed him, none. He plays by himself, mostly, the imagination games of children. In his head, he wears a suit of armor and slays monsters. One monster in particular, over and over again.
And when it’s dead, Alphonse’ pa never puts hands to the boy again.

Deeds, Not Words

It was announced recently that the Book of Vile Darkness is up for the Fourth Edition treatment this year. It was one of them ore popular books for 3.5, and it started the whole “Intended for Mature Audiences” movement of D&D books that brought on such wonders as the Book of Exalted Deeds and the Book of Erotic Fantasy (heh). It was probably one of the best sourcebooks 3.5 D&D put out, but I had a few issues with it. In particular, I found the focus to be more on gruesome content than any real discussion of evil. There’s some demons and stuff in it, sure, and a lot of the spell effects are like “Fuck you, good characters! Mwah ha ha ha ha haaaaa!” but there isn’t a lot of stuff that I would throw part-and-parcel into the “evil” category.
There’s a lot of wiggle-room on the concept of “evil,” though. Is killing sentient creatures and taking their stuff “evil?” Well, I put that into a solid “Yes,” on evil, but it’s the preface for the vast majority of D&D (and other role-playing) games that you will occasionally bash in monsters’ faces to increase your own power, wealth and status. So when I need to unnerve my players a bit, when I need them to squirm a little, I have to pull out some big guns. Simply hurting people isn’t enough to get across that a bad guy is vile; that bad guy needs to hurt people in the most intimate and horrifying ways possible.
This creature is an example of the sorts of things I’ll do to make my players a touch more uncomfortable than just putting them in a 10x10 room with a hobgoblin. It’s not something for the faint of heart; this monster feeds on the fear, pain and suffering of others, and manipulates people into some of the worst betrayals a person can imagine. It reaches into the darkest places of someone’s mind and brings those things to the fore.

The Monster(s?)

The real monster is abuse. Let’s be fair, this monster is not one you’re going to throw into a random dungeon; it can’t survive there. It needs to live in someone’s home, where the potential for real emotional turmoil and trauma exists. Most importantly, it needs to find a crack, a place where the dark desires and urges run through a human mind. While a mother or father might normally love and support their children, the Vile Darkness can urge them to the unthinkable. Where a woman might love her husband unconditionally, the Vile Darkness can seep into her mind, taunting her into an horrific betrayal. And though a young man may truly love his betrothed, the Darkness can turn his mind to harm, or even murder. It would be incapable of doing these things if those emotions, those thoughts, didn’t already exist in the victim’s mind. The most monstrous aspect of this creature is its ability to bring out the monster in otherwise good people.
Discovering the Vile Darkness requires some investigation. If you want to relegate this to the realm of the Skill Challenge, feel free to do so, but I would rely more on heavy role-playing with a couple of prompted Perception and Insight rolls. And the abuse that the Darkness brings out in people doesn’t need to be physical; sexual, emotional and mental abuse all happen every day, and each comes with its own cocktail of betrayals. Complicating factors for the encounter can be as complicated as the victim of the abuse trying to protect the abuser, or another abusive situation in which the Vile Darkness has had no part (and this, truly, is more terrifying than any fantasy monster ever could be). When it turns out that the physically abusive parents on the el’Menith farm aren’t violent at the urging of a monster, but that the Darkness’ target has been Avery ven Maslia and his pretty new bride, it pushes the encounter to a different level.

The Vile Darkness		Level 3 Elite Controller
Medium		XP 300
HP 86; Bloodied 43 AC 17; Fortitude 15; Reflex 15; Will 15 Speed 6 Saving Throws +2; Action Points 1		Initiative +1 Perception +1
Traits
O Betrayal • Aura 2
A creature that starts its turn within the Vile Darkness' Betrayal Aura makes a saving throw. If the creature fails that saving throw, it is possessed until the end of the Darkness' next turn.
Standard Actions
M Incite Violence • At-Will
Attack: +8 vs. AC
Hit: 1d6 + 4 psychic damage and the target deals damage to an adjacent ally equal to their Intelligence modifier. .
R Dark Whispers • At-Will
Attack: Range 10 (ignores line of sight); +7 vs. Will
Hit: 1d10 + 5 psychic damage and the target makes a melee basic attack against an adjacent ally. If the creature is possessed, it gets a +2 power bonus to the attack. .
C Shame • At-Will
Attack: Close burst 3 (targets enemies in burst); +8 vs. AC
Hit: 3d10 + 3 psychic and shadow damage, and the target is dazed until the end of the Vile Darkness' next turn. .
Triggered Actions
Feeding on Your Pain • Recharge 6
Trigger: An creature is hit by an ally's attack. .
Effect (Free): The Vile Darkness gains hit points equal to one half of the damage dealt by the triggering attack.
Str 11 (+1)	Dex 11 (+1)		Wis 11 (+1)
Con 11 (+1)	Int 11 (+1)		Cha 11 (+1)
Alignment      Languages —
© 2010 Wizards of the Coast LLC, a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc. All rights reserved. This formatted statistics block has been generated using the D&D Adventure Tools.

Art jacked from ~therook @ deviantart

Peculiar Curios: A Double Helping of Earrings

Sun and Moon Earrings Level 17

This pair of matching earrings bears a crescent moon near the hook, a starburst in the center, and an arrow point at the bottom. When you wear them, a soft glow shows the time of day.

Item Slot Head 65,000 gp

Property: Gain an innate sense of the time. You know what time it is, down to the second.

Power (Daily): Standard. Make a Primary Ability attack vs Will against a single creature within ten squares of you. If that creature is hit by the attack, choose Standard, Move, or Minor. That creature cannot make that type of action until the end of your next turn.

Something I think I'd like Wizards to do a bit more would be integrating flavor and rules a bit more. Like, it's great that the rules are simple to read and easy to use, but when I read something like the rules text from Legend of the Five Rings, I get all giddy inside. They can write "The troubles of the world take a toll on your soul that only sake can lift," right there in the rules text, and people are like "Yeah, sure, whatever. Card does this," without any difficulty. It would make reading rules descriptions for shit a lot more interesting. So I'm going to re-do the Sun and Moon earrings, and we'll put them side by side, and you can tell me which one is better.

Sun and Moon Earrings Level 17

This pair of matching earrings bears a crescent moon near the hook, a starburst in the center and an arrow point at the bottom. When you wear them, a soft glow shows the time of day,

Item Slot Head 65,000 gp

Property: Even though you can't see the glow, you gain an innate sense of the time. You always know what time it is, down to the second. The glow is not bright enough to betray your position to enemies while you hide, but it allows your allies to tell what time it is just by looking at you.

Power (Daily): Standard Action. You draw strength from the arcane time-magic in the earrings and direct it at your opponent, stealing a few precious seconds from their life. Though it doesn't hurt them directly, they'll definitely notice the inconvenience. Make an attack using your primary ability vs Will against a single creature. If the attack hits, you can choose either Move, Minor or Standard. The target cannot make that type of action until the end of your next turn.

That, to me, makes a lot more sense. Stealing a few seconds away from you is what I was looking at doing with the mechanic, and I think that the mechanic does that, but it's a lot more fun for me as the guy with the words to actually show you what I meant by it. And all it takes to separated a piece of flavor text from the rules text is some italics.

Encountering D&D: The Boss Fight

To be perfectly honest, if anything was a misstep in this adventure's design, it's putting Benwick up as the last fight instead of the giant, awesome dragon of the previous encounter. Story-wise, it totally makes sense to have a showdown with Benwick at the end of the chapter, and I understand why the choice was made, but fighting a portly monk/cultist after taking down a fucking dragon seems a bit anti-climatic.

Also, the meeting with Longstrider seems a bit, y'know, tacked on. It's like this entire encounter was more of an afterthought, and the season actually ended last week. Still, there are some nifty things going on here, and there are a couple of cute tricks you can pull into your own games, if you look for them.

Kendon Longstrider

The idea of having a wishy-washy NPC ally mechanically represented is cute. Here's poor never-seen-before Kendon, hanging out and doing his own thing, when his whole life gets flipped by some dragon cultists and a boatload of lizard folk. He doesn't know whose side he's on; he isn't on anyone's side, and if he can be convinced to fight for one side or the other, that has more to do with the force of personality of the people involved.

Kendon is sort of Everyman Fighterguy. He is the very definition of what I consider the Neutral alignment from 1-3.5 to have been; he's indecisive and will fight for anyone, mostly because he doesn't know what to think. He's known Benwick for a good long time, and he's seemed like a pretty alright dude, but the adventurers have saved the keep a couple of times now, and Ben's acting like a bit of a douche.

Having some (pretty much all) of your non-affiliated NPCs act like this guy probably isn't a horrible idea. I ran a session of Bones where a crowd of people was loyal to the villain, but when he started causing the deaths of hundreds of his fans, they started to turn on him. For a while, the struggle went back and forth between the party and the rock star they were fighting, but eventually the group won out and the crowd came to their aid in fighting the Badness.

It's Okay to Let the Boss Fight Go Long

There's a lot of boxed text in this session. Not so much in the beginning, but after everything's been taken care of, there's more, and the more is pretty hefty. That is totally reasonable, and I'm glad Wizards took the time to wrap the campaign up in a way that is interesting from a rules perspective (more on that in a bit).

One of the things that's been getting a lot of airtime in the 4E community is the length of your average fight, and how to make that time shorter. Personally, I like the long fights. If I spend a five hour session of D&D, and the single fight of the night lasts about an hour and half to two hours, that's a pretty solid session. It's something I needed to learn to account for in my game planning, but beyond that, there's no reason to vilify long fights.

Boss fights are allowed to go longer than most. They're supposed to be climatic moments in the story of the game, points where everything finally gets resolved, and sometimes you need to take some extra time to really focus in on those and make them worth it. It can be very satisfying to bash in the skull of someone who has been screwing you around for a few months (like Benwick has), and the players are going to enjoy finally taking his ass down,

The Quest Challenge

One of the best things about this chapter, one of the things that I looked at and went "Huh. Why didn't I think of that?" is on page eight of the adventure book. It has a little chart that tells you what all the minor quests were in the chapter, and then has you tally those up and see how you did overall. If your party succeeded in most of the minor quests, you get the happy ending. If your party failed at most of the same quests, you get the unhappy ending. This is an interesting look at what Chris Tulach, Greg Bilsland and Gregg Marks called "Branching tree design" at D&DXP last week. It's interesting to note that in this season, the only branch to the tree is in the last chapter, but I think we can expect to see branches like this coming out earlier in the season through March of the Phantom Brigade and Dark Legacy of Evard.

It's something that people who GM at home do fairly naturally. "Oh, you sucked at this thing? Well, it's definitely going to come back and bite you in the ass."

That's all I've got for this week's Encountering D&D. I have the books in for next week's Session, and I'm chomping at the bit to get the new season started. This one was a lot of fun and I hope that continues through the next few seasons.

My Players Wrote Filk

So the universe is in peril, and my player characters are trying to build an alliance of peoples to fight against it. There's this dead god they woke up a while ago, and he's doing naughty things to all of existence. While trying to convince Jacques le'Dwarf to sign the alliance papers, they wrote a song, and I thought it was clever. It's in Jacques' native Dwarven.

Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques
Signez-vous? Signez-vous?
La fin du monde arrive, La fin du monde arrive
Maintenant, maintenant

Bestiary of Badassery: Master of Puppets

Sometimes, you start with art.

For the record, Brom has never painted anything I’ve hated. His work is moody, surreal, and gave Dark Sun and Nightbane their _edge_, y’know? His spooky paintings make you ask questions, and the answers to those questions are often monstrous and strange.
Also, I’m reading his book. It’s quite good.
So the questions I’m asking of Mr. Sadness the Clown here are thus:
1) Who are those people, and why do you have them dangling from barbed wire?
2) What does the key open?
3) The little bauble on you right side: what is that?
4) Where did the nails come from? That looks very uncomfortable.
My own answers to these questions are:
1) The young lady is a warforged wizard. She was specifically designed to look and act like a human girl, but there are still signs of her mechanical nature (she looks a little doll-like in places). The young gentleman is a damsel in distress. By the look of it, he is quite distressed right now.
2) The key opens a door that is actually a portal to a place where a dingus lives. The dingus in question is very important to the quest of our heroes. Alternatively, it opens nothing. That would be unfortunate.
3) The bauble on his right side is the monster’s pull-string. If you somehow manage to cut the string off, he has a short time to act before he powers down entirely. In the alternative situation in Answer 2, this is the real key.
4) The nails having nothing to do with this monster. The nails are a gift from the monster in the next room.
So what exactly is this guy capable of? I think, for one thing, dominate effects are in play. Because I like the interactions with players a little more, I’m going to suggest that my own “Possessed” status might be a better choice; players get to choose one action to perform, but the monster chooses the other two actions for them.
Barbed wire is slightly horrifying, so we’re going to have to work in ranged binding attacks that are sustainable and deal damage. The creature will also have horrifying minions that do it’s bidding which aren’t actually a part of the powerset, but more a question of encounter design. Having something of a spider’s web of possessed people trying to kill you can be pretty horrifying.
I’m also thinking that this creature is stationary. He’ll have one of Chris Sims’ donut auras that makes him nearly impossible to kill from range, so the player characters will need to wade through the minions (and maybe a lieutenant or two) to get to him.

Master of Puppets		Level 21 Solo Controller
Medium shadow animate (construct, undead)		XP 16,000
HP 784; Bloodied 392 AC 32; Fortitude 36; Reflex 30; Will 39 Speed 0 Resist 15 poison, 15 shadow; Vulnerability 15 fire Saving Throws +5 against dazed and stunned effects; Action Points 2		Initiative +15 Perception +15 Blindsight 10
Traits
O Shadows of Protection • Aura 3
Attacks that originate from outside the aura deal half damage to creatures within the aura.
O Shadows of Negation • Aura 6
Attacks that originate from outside the aura deal no damage to creatures within the aura.
Standard Actions
Barbed Whip • At-Will
Attack: Range 20 (targets one creature); +24 vs. AC
Hit: 2d10 + 12 primal damage and the target is slowed until the end of the Master of Puppets' next turn. .
Barbed Tangles (artifice, primal) • At-Will
Attack: Burst 1 within 10 (targets enemies in burst); +24 vs. AC
Hit: 2d10 + 13 primal damage and the target is grabbed. The Master of Puppets can sustain this grab as a minor action. If the grab is maintained this way, the target takes an additional 1d10+8 damage.
M The Master's Touch (reliable) • Encounter
Attack: +27 vs. Will
Hit: 4d10 + 8 damage, and the target takes ongoing damage equal to half its bloodied value (save ends).
R Strings on Me (psychic, charm) • Recharge at the beginning of the master of puppets' turn, if no creature is possessed.
Attack: Range 6 (targets a single creature); +27 vs. Will
Hit: The targe is possessed (save ends).
Move Actions
Summon Puppets • At-Will
Effect: Burst 4; The Master of Puppets summons 1d4 Puppet Minions into empty spaces within the burst. Until the end of the Master of Puppets' next turn, Puppet Minions summoned this turn gain a +2 power bonus to their speed. .
Minor Actions
Pull my String • Encounter
Effect: Burst 1 (targets up to two Puppet Minions within burst.); The target dies. Master of Puppets gains 196 hit points.
Triggered Actions
• At-Will
Trigger: The Master of Puppets is hit with a critical hit.
Effect (Immediate Reaction): The Master of Puppets' string has been cut. It enters into the Berserker Stance. While in this stance, the Master of Puppets adds one die to the damage of all of its attacks and gets a +5 bonus to attack rolls. At the end of each turn, the Master of Puppets takes 75 artifice damage and until the end of the encounter cannot be healed.
Str 20 (+15)	Dex 20 (+15)		Wis 20 (+15)
Con 20 (+15)	Int 20 (+15)		Cha 20 (+15)
Alignment      Languages —
© 2010 Wizards of the Coast LLC, a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc. All rights reserved. This formatted statistics block has been generated using the D&D Adventure Tools.

Puppet Minion		Level 21 Minion Brute
Medium shadow animate (human)		XP 800
HP 1; a missed attack never damages a minion AC 33; Fortitude 33; Reflex 32; Will 32 Speed 6		Initiative +13 Perception +12
Standard Actions
m Craftsman's Hammer (weapon) • At-Will
Attack: +24 vs. AC
Hit: 12 damage.
Move Actions
Ain't Got No Strings • Encounter
Effect: (Targets one creature.); The Puppet Minion shifts up to it's speed, beginning and ending the shift adjacent to the target. The target is immobilized (save ends). .
Minor Actions
Liar Liar • Recharge 4 5 6
Effect: The Puppet Minion gains reach 2 until the end of it's next turn.
Str 25 (+17)	Dex 23 (+16)		Wis 22 (+16)
Con 18 (+14)	Int 12 (+11)		Cha 15 (+12)
Alignment evil     Languages Common
Equipment cultist robes, longsword
© 2010 Wizards of the Coast LLC, a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc. All rights reserved. This formatted statistics block has been generated using the D&D Adventure Tools.

Formatting tables in Windows Live Writer is stupid. I may need to look at new blogging software. Again.