At Will

One Bad Egg has “open sourced” a pantheon for use in 4e games. Why? In their words:

The GSL doesn’t let you refer to any of the gods from the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS 4TH EDITION PLAYER’S HANDBOOK by name and, by extension, any of the feats or powers containing their names. This can be a real pain in the butt if you’re looking to create a new player race that’s excellent for building paladins or clerics or whatnot and you want to talk about sample characters and what gods they worship. But if you accept this license, you’ll be able to do that with our gods, no problem.

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The Tome Show let me back on !

This episode Jeff had myself and Dave Chalker on to discuss the Draconomicon.  It was a lot of fun, and definitely worth a listen if you’re either on the fence on buying the book, or have it and want to hear other opinions.

Playwrite has a bevy of cool tools that I’m downloading as I type this and will be testing out shortly — I’ll give full video reviews soon, but in the meantime you should check out the following Windows software and see what you think as all the tools seem promising:

• Trackworks – an initiative tracker, compatible with 4e.
• 4th Edition Power Creator – easily the best looking power creator I’ve seen.  Nice interface, HTML export features. One of the tools I’m most excited about.
• Crawlnotes – So. Fricken. Cool.  It might replace my current tool for session notes, The Journal. Mock out  dungeon visually and attach your notes to it!
• 4e Class Creator – Not out yet, but worth watching and waiting for.

Some great software here, so I hope there’s more to come.

A twitter friend (hello greywulf!) pointed me out to the most awesome source of draconic might in the universe. It is a dragon…made of cake. The only feature this mystical morsel was missing…was stats.

No more. Behold the glorious power of the young cake dragon (cake dragons don’t ever live to ancient, and you wouldn’t want them to).

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This time courtesy of Greywulf’s Lair.  My favorite is Roll Five:

This is something we’ve used to good effect in previous sessions. Have the players roll 5 d20s at the start of combat and jot them down. These are their combat rolls for the next five rounds, and they can use them in any order, for any attack. This greatly speeds up combat and encourages tactical play at the same time. Let’s say the player rolls 20, 17, 10, 6 and 2. They’re most likely to use the 20 for a Daily or Encounter Power (’cos missing with those sucks, right). They’ll save that for when it matters the most, burning the low rolls on at-wills and doing what they can to turn them into hits. It’s amazing how players love combat modifiers when they know they’ve got a low roll to work with. Not rolling the attack dice round-by-round means more time to emphasize role-playing and tactical play – another good thing. Optionally, allow the player to spend an Action Point to re-roll their 5 if they don’t like how the dice fell. Every five rounds, call for another five rolls, and keep on playing.

Solid stuff here worth looking at.  I’ll certainly use this one in my games.