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Welcome to Time Stop, your Forth Edition Dungeons & Dragons week in review. My name is Milambus, and I will be your host for this journey through the highlights from around the Web for the week ending Friday, May 22nd, 2009. Our journey this week shall take us through the lands of Wizards of the Coast, the RPG Podcasts community and finally into the dark and mysterious world of the RPG Bloggers Network.
The big news from the land of the Wizards this week was an announced change to D&D Insider. You may recall that just a few weeks ago they announced the official separation of player content and DM content, into Dragon and Dungeon respectively. This week the big announcement is that starting July 7th, they will be debuting complete, playable sections from the Player’s Handbook 3 each month until the book is released next March. Oh, and they will be raising the rates for DDI subscriptions to $9.95 a month ($71.40 for a year, 40% off).
In other news two new products released this week, Monster Manual 2 and the new set of D&D Minis, Dangerous Delves. Tomorrow, May 23rd is the second World Wide D&D Game Day celebrating the release of these two products. I have volunteered to DM for my Friendly Local Game Store, how about you? To find locations near you hosting Game Day events head over to the Store & Event Locator.
Episode 41 from the Brilliant Gameologists was released earlier this week. This was the last episode from their second season and discussed the topic of organizing a gaming group. As always I found some good advice within this episode.
Warning: The Brilliant Gameologists are NOT safe for work. They can’t even tell you that they are not safe for work without it having offended people at your work. You have been warned. And yes, you should go listen to them anyway.
Uncle Bear was recently listed in Wired.com’s 100 Geeks You Should be Following on Twitter. In response to that list he created his own, the 101 RPG geeks you should follow on Twitter. Congrats to gamefiend for making the second list. I am not on the list, but you can find me @Milambus.
NewbieDM is offering an excellent FREE DM Starter Kit to assist new DMs run the Kobold Hall adventure that comes in the back of the Forth Edition’s Dungeon Master’s Guide. The kit includes battle maps for all 5 encounters, tokens for each of the enemies, tokens to track conditions, and an initiative tracker.
While I’m discussing battle maps and tokens, I want to share with you a series of articles posted over on theIcosahedrophilia blog. (Listen to their podcasts to find out how to pronounce it.) This series of articles, titled Nanotechnology, covers a wide range of topics all dealing with D&D Minis. From storing D&D minis, to distingusing identical minis, to tracking conditions on your minis. They also have reviews of the Player’s Handbook Heros line of minis and the just released Dangerous Delves minis. (Yes, that is a lot of links… you can thank me later.)
Finally, to round out our week The Game posted his Lessons from the Heroic Tier over at Critical Hits. He discusses several of the problems that he and his players have discovered while playing through the Heroic Tier of 4e. In the end he states that despite all the problems, 4e is his favorite version of Dungeons & Dragons.
If you wish to see more of my writing, you can head on over to Milambus.com. There I write about various game mechanics, house rules that I may implement and whatever else that comes to my mind.
Milambus, aka Jake Fitch, has been a lifelong player of video games,card games, and board games. With the recent release of the Fourth Edition of Dungeons & Dragons he finally decided to start playing tabletop RPGs. He keeps informed on all the latest news from WotC, and RPG bloggers/podcasters and then shares that information with you. 
No love for the Simian Race for 4e?
http://robertsongames.com/role-playing-games/dungeons-dragons/simian-race-for-4e
Very useful and informative post! Thanks!
I’ve since subscribed to a couple of the blogs you point out.
@Stuart Truthfully, I don’t read through many player created races/classes. Most of them are not written very well, balanced correctly or they simply do not appeal to me.
@dar I’m glad you found some useful information in there. Thats my hope for this article, to help people find all the good information that is out there.
@milambus Heh. That’s how I feel about a number of the official races/classes.