Neverwinter News

Today’s Neverwinter Campaign Setting excerpt is about racial variants, specifically gold and shield dwarves. Previous editions swamped us with sub-races, allowing you to cherry pick the elf, dwarf, or even orc whose ability score modifiers best match up with your class. Do not get me wrong I am used to players going with optimized race/class combinations, but I much prefer 4th Edition’s removal of racial penalties and inclusion of racial feats to help push different concepts, instead of just making a shitload of slightly different races.

See? If we go with gold dwarf we can be paladins without a Charisma penalty.

Thankfully these are not nearly as aggressive, functioning more like a combination of a background and racial feature swap. For example, gold dwarves can choose to gain a bonus to Dungeoneering or learn Deep Speech or Elven, and can opt to exchange their save bonus on poisons for one against psychic damage, and/or gain proficiency with war picks and mails instead of axes and hammers. There’s also some role-playing notes to help give you some pointers on what it means to be a [insert racial variant here].

This isn’t the actual picture, but it looks waaay cooler.

In other news, a preview for the bladesinger class–a wizard subclass–can be found here. It is still an arcane controller, but uses a mix of melee attacks and ranged followups to get the job done: every time you make a basic melee attack you can cast one of your Bladesong spells on a critter within 10 squares. Strangely the melee attacks are keyed to Intelligence, while the spells are linked to Dexterity. Luckily Guarded Flourish not only gives you a shield bonus to AC in light-or-no-armor, but also lets you ignore opportunity attacks when zapping your enemies.

Other features include allowing you to use a light or heavy blade as an implement (you have to choose, which I like because it lets other races choose more thematic weapons), a bladesong encounter utility that gives you a big attack and damage bonus for a turn, spellbook, cantrips, suggestion, and magic missile. You still get to pick other spells, though another different mechanic is how the bladesinger handles encounter spells…in that they are treated as daily spells (of which you get none).

It is kind of one part wizard, one part swordmage, and one part monk. You get a lot of wizard features and spells, but you will spend most of your time carving up monsters in melee while simultaneously rolling out No Action magic with static damage and controller riders. For example, dancing fire causes a target to grant combat advantage, dazzling sunray imposes an attack penalty, and frost bite slows. While it sounds very striker-ish, the damage is based off of your Dexterity mod, scaling at levels 11 and 21, and I think it is balanced by the fact that you don’t have daily spells, instead starting with two encounter spells that you can only use once per day.

There is other class features mentioned on the table, such as Arcane Strike and Steely Retort, but we’ll have to wait and see what they do in future previews/after the book is released. Anyway, it looks really cool and I am glad to see WotC building a class that does what they want to do without sticking to previous class progression models.

Excerpts: Heroes of Shadow, Shadow Classes

Assassin blah blah paladin blah blah, vampire. Finally, we get a peek at their level 1 capabilities.

Vampires are shadow strikers keyed to Dexterity and Charisma, which was what I’d expected. Likewise, it utilizes the Essentials progression model, giving you lot of class features at level 1, but without any choice on the matter, and aside from a Utility Power gained at level 2, seems to dictate basically everything else about you as well. That being said, let’s see what a newly created vampire has at her disposal.

While At-Will Powers is listed, none are featured. That sucks. The daily power has the implement keyword, but no mention as to which they will use, or if they can use weapons (or are supposed to). Also, the table of contents mentioned two separate builds, which might mean that you might get abilities not mentioned here (like how warpriests and mages get bonus shit based on their domain or school). It might also function like the knight/slayer, in that there will be two entirely separate sections. We’ll have to wait and see.

That being said, here’s the featured features.

• Child of the Night: You’re undead, so you don’t need to breathe and you don’t age, but you do have to sleep. You also have darkvision, resist 5 necrotic, vulnerable 5 radiant, and both take radiant damage and are weakened when in sunlight without some kind of protective covering, like a cloak (which is what I guessed yesterday). So far, so good. I don’t mind being immune to sunlight so long as you meet such a simple condition. It would make it very difficult being a vampire otherwise. I know some people are going to be pissed off about this, but just fucking change it so that being in direct sunlight hurts you no matter what.
• Blood is Life: You can snack on an ally while taking a short rest to regain hit points equal to two of your healing surges. I don’t know why it repeats the benefit. Also, if you end a short rest with more healing surges than you’re supposed to have, you lose all of the excess ones, but regain all of your hit points. Very nice.
• Enduring Soul: You gain regeneration equal to your Charisma modifier when bloodied. Wow, especially given that Cha is a secondary stat, it’s going to scale pretty damned high at later levels. Kinda makes me not want to play a shifter with this, however.
• Hidden Might: You gain a scaling damage bonus to all your vampire attacks equal to your Charisma modifier. This is basically their striker bonus, and is on par with a sorcerer, so nothing new here.
• Vampiric Reflexes: This gives you a small AC boost when you are wearing cloth armor/no armor, and aren’t carrying a shield around. Basically keeps you on par with other strikers. I’m guessing they won’t start with any armor proficiencies, either. 
• Blood Drinker: An encounter attack that lets you automatically deal bonus damage on a hit with another attack, and you gain a healing surge. This is basially power strike by another name, with a small bonus. Seeing as it doesn’t require you to have grabbed a creature on the previous round, I highly approve.
• Swarm of Shadows: A daily close blast 3 attack that turns you into a swarm of shadows, deal lots of damage (plus ongoing damage), teleport, and become invisible for a bit. This looks very brutal, especially because it only targets enemies.

And then the excerpt wraps up with something about warlocks and the other classes that we already knew. I’m really liking the vampire, and it provides a foundation for building other monstrous classes. It reminds me of having Savage Species “back in the day”, and I’m looking forward to seeing what custom classes others make.

Monster Vault: Purple Worm

I remember using purple worms as a basis for overworms when running Age of Worms (converted to 4th Edition of course). The result was a boring, drawn-out slugfest; despite being level 16 solo soldiers they could basically make all of two attacks on the third round, assuming they managed to bite, grab, and swallow someone. That’s…well, there’re standard monsters that can do stuff like that.

Let’s Compare
The new purple worm is two levels lower, a brute, and actually lives up to its solo status. I’m just going to skip to the powers, since obviously hit points and defenses are going to be lower.

• It has two traits, ponderous and blooded frenzy, which allow it to take immediate actions while stunned, dazed, or dominated, and grant an extra minor action while bloodied respectively.
• Though lower level, its bite deals 10 more damage on average.
• Swallow is replaced by devour whole, allowing it to eat you in one action instead of three. The attack deals 3d10 + 7 damage on average, and you take 10 more points of acid damage while swallowed.
• Its also got several minor action attacks; fling deals 3d10 + 8 damage and slides the target quite a distance, poison stinger only deals 2d8 damage, but also lumps on ongoing 15 poison damage, and regurgitate lets it barf up a swallowed creature up to 4 squares away, and deal 3d10 + 8 damage.
• Finally, thrash is an immediate reaction that triggers when it gets hit by any attack, targeting up to two creatures, and dealing 3d12 + 5 plus a 6 square push.

So, there you have it. With a Melee range of 3 for all of it’s attacks and plenty of Minor Action options to boot, this guy is going to be slapping the entire party around. While not as resistant to lockdown conditions as say, a dragon, he can still reactively swat you and do some other nasty things in the process. They’re much scarier now, even without some bullshit DC 25 Strength-draining poison attack.