At Will

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.

I recently talked about what makes a villain work in the context of an RPG campaign. Today I’m going to talk about three different types of villain. The next few Fridays I will give specific examples of the villains, ready to be dragged and dropped and possibly re-skinned (painful!) for your 4e games. In the spirit of “The New Breed” , we’ll lay out some basic background and psychology for :

• The Well Intentioned Villain
• The Nihilist Villain
• The Faustian Villain

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Reading is Fundamental

The session starts down one Bobrick . It’s the aftermath of the party’s defense of themselves versus a group of angry specters in the Ivory Library. They go through the books to find items of interest and find several.  I had props for each book printed out, but an accident involving my cat and water ruined them quick, and I’m saving printer ink for my maps.

The players learn more about the Grey Guard, the Baron’s forces, and about the Shadowfell version of Greyharbour (named coincidentally, Blackharbour), as well as a bit about the dragonborn city Iovanthar.

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This session we started two men down. Tragic! Since the game only runs every two weeks though, I’m not eager to miss a game session unless we absolutely have to. So, we assume that Odd Whispan and Grimshenko are tagging along behind, writing them passively out of the scene.

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Honestly, I think about more than skill challenges! In the queue of my mind right now: convergence. I mention this and what I speak of explicitly is merging together of two or more campaigns. I’ve done this once before and it was a pretty amazing experience that people I’m in touch with from that time still talk to me about.

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