From DDXP 2009

You can get a podcast from Radio Free Hommlet that talks about D&D XP. In case you are lazy, here are the highlights (products are listed in the order of release…hopefully), cribbed from the Wizards forums.

Arcane Power will contain rules for familiars and support the swordmage and sorcerer, but not the artificer. Since it wont be officially released until Eberron Player’s Guide, this makes sense.

Divine Power will contain rules for customizing divine classes with domains.

Primal Power apparently will explain how it differs from the arcane and divine power sources. I guess some people are having trouble wrapping their heads around that? Feh.

Plane Below will be a companion to Manual of the Planes, but focus mostly on the Elemental Chaos. Cool beans!

Dungeon Master’s Guide 2 will be mostly oriented for the paragon tier. Logically we can expect the third iteration to focus on the epic tier, and this is a great way for them to extend the longevity of this book.
The featured city is indeed Sigil, and will go into a similar amount of detail that you saw for Fallcrest in Dungeon Master’s Guide.

Adventurer’s Vault 2 will have item sets. Not really new, since they did the same thing in Magic Item Compendium at the LATEST. I was actually considering making a few of my own for homebrew campaigns. I probably still will, but its good to know they get core support. :-3
Also, its reported to have new item types (kind of like how the first one introduced mount and companion items, methinks).

Revenge of the Giants is now going to be a hardcover book. This is extremely exciting to me, and hopefully its not as big a letdown as Shackled City was.
Monster Manual 2 will be “as big” as Monster Manual.
Speaking of adventures, you fight Doresain in E2. Since you fight Orucs in E3, this makes sense.

Dragon Magazine Annaul 2009: I’m glad I keep hearing about this, because I kept fearing that Wizards would pull the plug on it. Though I have a DDI subscription, I am still going to get this so I can have the good stuff in print. It will not have anything new, so if you are like Adrian and fucking print your articles, you probably wont get anything out of this.

Draconomicon 2: Metallic Dragons will feature, well, metallic dragons. Iron, adamantine, gold, and silver dragons were specifically mentioned, meaning they might not be in MM2. At any rate, ways to work them in as bad guys will be packed in there somewhere. Hooray.

Seeking Other Pastures

Keith Baker is going to start traveling around the world soon, exchanging entertainment for hospitality. Basically, you let him shack up for 1-3 nights, he runs games for you. Actually, his preference is that he runs for you, and you run for him, as he wants to get to experience as many diverse groups as possible.
If this intrigues you, hit him up in the thread I linked, or just email him directly.

GameScience Dice

February’s Dragon

This month’s issue of Dragon brought us a few gems: the dhampyr, some class previews, and an article on undead stuff that to me is a good companion to Open Grave. Hestavar was alright. We’re not epic level yet, and maybe further down the road I’ll incorporate it into my own implied setting. At least it had a cool epic destiny.

February looks about as promising: another class preview (shaman), Playing Shadar-Kai, Planar Epic Destinies, and Necromantic Rituals appeal to me the most. I’m curious about the preview for Primal Power, and I have no fucking clue what Returned Tarmalune is about.

I barely even remember shadar-kai in 3rd Edition. 4th Edition made them core, but to me they are still kinda by the wayside. I’m working on an undead-heavy adventure series with Red Jason and Adrian, so I’ll finally be able to do something with them. Adrian was enjoying his playtest shadar-kai invoker that worshipped, of all deities, Pelor. I think there is potential in them, and we’ll see how Wizards taps them next Friday.

I like Manual of the Planes, and I like how they managed to make planar-themed stuff for players that doesnt require you to be situated within them, a dimensional squatter. You can get some mileage out of all of them even in the world. I’m also a fan of Planescape, so hell, the more planar love, the better.

I’m hoping that Necromantic Rituals contains some neat way to create undead servitors or whatnot. The one in Open Grave was pretty tame: you get a deader that really doesnt do anything except serve as a liability.

Whelp, back to homework!

Dawn of War II

Played the Dawn of War II beta today, and its been a pretty shitty ride. I really enjoyed the first one, and I dont know where Relic went wrong. First of all, it doesnt play anything like the other one: you dont really build anything except for units. Unlike the tabletop game, you get an extremely limited amount of Requisition to build with, so you end up taking quite awhile to get anything that might be considered a sizable force.

Part of the problem is that there is no tutorial to be found. You are basically thrust into this game and must navigate your own way through this grim and dark future. There are no tech buildings, resources trickle in incredibly slowly, and there is almost no way to actually try and hold onto territory that you acquire.
The hours I’ve spent trying to figure out this game and actually play it were universally frustrating. I start out by capturing points, only to have the computer run up and take them the moment I go somewhere else. If I leave a squad there, then I just end up losing another point. If I can manage to wrestle with my anger long enough to get a whole of three squads, generally the computer just bypasses everything I have out and fucks up my base instead. That, or they just send in a fucking dreadnaut that is immune to damage from anything but my hive tyrant (which gets killed incredibly quickly anyway).

Coming in from Dawn of War, this sequal only bests it in the graphics department. It looks great, plays like shit. I’ve only managed to actually successfully complete one game so far. Every other time I end up quitting after about half an hour of playing “run around the map and try to reclaim my points and watch my guys get killed very quickly by a trio of space marines”. Generally the matches just didnt go anywhere: it was just a fucking game of hide and seek until I my squads started to dwindle into oblivion.
I’m canceling my pre-order. Perhaps in two months Relic will make some fixes to make the game actually, well…fun.

Edit: Oh yeah…

I actually ended up going to the forums to see what others thought about it. I guess the “right” way to play tyranids is to get tyranid warriors and get the right synapse upgrade. The problem is that if you get the first upgrade for them, you cant get another one. Also, they take a LOT of time to make, so at best you can expect to maybe have a squad of warriors and the starting squad of termagants. Assuming they are still alive by the time you manage to get enough power points to build them.
This is a problem because it seems to contain a lot of “game mastery” involved. Basically, if you dont play it the “right” way, you will lose. You cant build the units you want, you have to build the right ones and do the right things to make them effective. This is bullshit, especially without any kind of tutorial that tells you “Hey, your shit sucks if you dont do this-or-that!”

Kobal

Concept of one of my character’s in Adrian‘s game: we’re currently plowing through Pyramid of Shadows. She is a level 7 tiefling resourceful warlord.

Review: Scales of War, Part 1

We’ve almost finished the first two adventures for Scales of War. I mostly like it thus far, in that it provides a complete barebones setup to entertain my group. I dislike that its difficult to capture the “bigger picture” of the adventure. For example, in Siege on Bordrin’s Watch, you basically go into the Stonehome Mountains to the Monastery of the Sundered Chain and kill a bunch of orcs. Easy, right?

Well, there is a party where you go underground and head down a massive flight of stairs. Somehow, this leads to a kind of forge in the next encounter. My question is how does the party get there? I guess with a more in-depth reading that I found out the stairs merely lead into a deep chasm. I thought they were underground the entire time. I mean, there’s no door there to stop wandering monsters from just barging into their sleeping quarters and killing them all in their sleep (and with those random encounter tables, this could be anything from a trio of griffons to a bunch of wights just wandering in).

I just went with that they were underground because I overlooked the part that said its actually outside, and had the ranger make a Perception check to notice tracks that lead some several hundred feet to the Chamber of Works. Nothing says that you can see it, and there is no indication of direction. Its like they just figure you’ll make it up, and hopefully your improvisations doesnt force you do have to backpedal later or make additional rewrites.

I feel that in these first two adventures Wizards did the exact opposite of Paizo: they realized that yes, too much pointless backstory and insight into a monster’s deepest desires is wasted text, but they went a bit too far and basically stripped it all away. Now there is no information given as to the rhyme or reason for virtually anything you find here. The Nexus is a super elaborate boiler room death trap. Is that all they built it for? I mean, they could have given a single sentence as to its original function (in-door heated plumbing comes to mind as opposed to a massive super-trap).

I’m going to move on and read the third installment and see how it reads out.

There’s One in Every Group

Or rather, there used to be. See, I was formerly the guy that had all the books, accessories, and miniatures. I had all that shit. Just me. Since we only gamed once a week during the era of 3rd Edition, my friends only bought a handful of books, waiting until they came over to peruse my massive archive of gaming supplements. Since they only played here, they didnt get Dungeon Tiles, and I think that only Red Jason ever got any minis (and to be fair, Bat Jew did buy one from me since he liked it so much).

4th Edition has stolen that title from me. I’m no longer that guy, since most of the players are buying all the books now. Red Jason has almost all of them, Adrian does, and the newest guy Josh picked up Player’s Guide to Forgotten Realms just for the swordmage class. That says something to me, that the game is so damned fun that players who would sit on their thumbs until game day to check out the new stuff are building their own gaming libraries. These are people who dont exactly have a lot of cash, and get them anyway (not to the exlucison of necessities, mind you).
Before, even if they had cash they wouldnt buy anything. Red Jason picked up Complete Divine because he likes paladins, but thats about it.

I’m really happy things turned out this way: it was getting annoying having the entire group waiting in line to go through Spell Compendium and Magic Item Compendium for their shit.

Review: Character Builder

Okay, after at least an hour of toiling, I finally got this fucker to install AND run properly. This actually took me longer to fix than the Beta did, and the error was similar (it for some reason cannot create folders in My Documents, whether or not they already exist). Unlike last time, it wasnt a simple matter of moving the folder that it couldnt make out and making a new one, I had to change the location of the Documents folder so that it could make a new one from scratch. After that, it was just a matter of waiting as my computer moved 115 Gb of data back where it belonged. Yargh.

So, the Character Builder.

I played with the Beta version and really had no complaints except for the fact that all of my characters were already past level 3. This builder goes up to 30. With every class, including the artificer and barbarian. It includes other preview classes, but they only go up to 3. That being said, if you want to start a new campaign, you can indeed build a druid, invoker, or bard. No news on the warden or sorcerer, yet.
Other than that, the only things that have changed are some of the previously locked options such as Houserules, and the layout. The layout actually got me, because after I leveled up my warlord in Adrian’s game to 7, it took me a couple minutes to figure out how to navigate about and see what I chose. The answer is that everything about your character is located under the Build tab. There are smaller sections that I overlooked that let you go to specific parts of your character (Class, Background, Ability Scores, etc).
This seems way more organized than the other one is, but it might confuse you for just a bit. No biggie.

I can see myself mostly using this to build a character in concept. I dont think that people are going to constantly print out updated characters, and I certainly woudlnt. If you have a laptop, this is great for managing a character digitally since you dont have to be online to use it. Myself, I prefer to use a PSP with an uploaded pdf file of my character and a small scratch pad for managing information that changes often (namely hit points and healing surges). Once a week I can update it, print it as a pdf, and then upload the new file. If I’m at my house, I can also just have it displayed on one monitor and still use a scratch pad. Saves myself costs on paper and ink, and looks great.

Otherwise, I havent encounterd any bugs. I know others have, and also that apparently it wont print journal entries yet (listed as part of the known bugs during startup). That being said, I really like this. Its much better than E-Tools ever was (meaning, that we actually use this). A few of the players in my group dont have DDI subscriptions, but are going to get them now because of this update. So, good job Wizards.

Character Builder is Live

I am installing it now. More to come when I make a bunch of level 30 characters.