At Will

A video tour of the very helpful, very cool Character Builder from Wizards of the Coast.

Work keeps my grubby mitts off of the full version of the character builder, but later tonight expect another video review of the application.  I’ll be handing this over to my players ASAP so they can track there characters on it.  It should make levelling tons smoother.

On my end, this will be great for mocking up NPCs and overall playing with different builds of the system.  Expect to see 4e characters on the site in the very near future.

More previews and teasers for Insider subscribers today.  This preview is for the sorceror, an arcane striker.  A lot of speculation floated around the directions the sorceror could take, but I’ll break down what actually has been done for you.

The sorceror remains intact in origin from it’s 3.5 roots, i.e. people who use arcane magic from instinctive talent rather than academic study.

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I’ve been wondering off and on why Sigil didn’t get more than six pages in the Manual of the Planes…looking at the WotC’s future plans, we’ll be getting that as the city in the DMG2.  This is kind of cool, but…I want Sigil nooooooow.  I mean, I still have some Planescape material to keep me warm, but I’d love to see it updated because Sigil is such a  cool place.  And I really just want to see a totally updated,revamped re-release of, I dunno….every Planescape book ever made.

And since I’m whining…what else do I want to see remade for 4e? I just got done reading the Power of Now, so I’m going to apply it here, to make sure it all happens as soon as I wish.

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The new PHB2 preview we have from WotC is the Warden.  I’d been curious to see what they were going to do.  The Warden is a Defender with the new primal power source, is essentially a nature knight.  Instead of donning heavy armor though, tapping into earth energies gives the Warden increased AC, supplementing the light armor he is given by the class for default (and sorry folks, but he loses the ability when he puts on heavy armor, so save that feat!).  Where fighters harry their foes with martial skills, Paladin invoke the wrath of their gods, and swordmages ensorcel their opponents, wardens harness the earth’s power.  They pull rocks and vines forth from the earth to trap and bind foes. They are built super tough –17 starting HP and 9 surges! –and have one ability that my players are wishing over after being caught in some nasty ongoing effects recently.  Wardens get two saves per turn! One save happens right at the start, before effects are applied, and the other is the normal save.  The class also gets a nice marking ability.  Once a turn, mark all adjacent creatures.  The punishment aspect isn’t nearly as strong as the other defenders though.

Out of all the defenders, Wardens thus far feel the most solid “tank” released so far. These guys are the most durable class I’ve seen yet, and combine them with the race that seems to love them most — dwarves — your party’s warden is going nowhere. No. Where.  The wardens don’t do nearly the damage of the other defenders from the preview I’ve seen, but when you have some of the abilities above, plus the ability to add either your Constitution or Wisdom to you second wind defense bump, you are getting very high, very quickly into the realm of super defense (and when you’re a dwarf, it’s a minor action…)

I was ‘meh’ on the invoker, but the Warden preview gets a big thumbs up.

Hope everyone had an enjoyable Christmas season.  Christmas was super-relaxing for me, and also gave me more time for writing and blogging. 

One of the nice perks of an Insider account –and this is a small thing, and not a reason to subscribe, really — is the archived image galleries that they are now releasing. It’s a great way to get handouts for your players or to get images to populate your campaign wiki.  The normal images are nice, and the map galleries are tremendously useful.  One of the things I’m most thirsty for as a GM these days are maps.  I’ll make them if I need to, but if I can have battlemaps pregenerated on-hand, it really helps my ability to improv and react to the unexpected actions of players.

WotC even goes to the trouble of giving us marked and unmarked maps.  This will be especially handy for the online game I am preparing to run (more on that later!).

As a GM, what places do you use to get maps and images for your campaigns?