Dungeons and Dragons Blog

March is right around the corner, and here’s some of the things I’ll be doing.

My Blast From the Past this month the original Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set.  In the 1980s, if you began playing D&D, the Basic Set was your first taste of the game.

My Product Review will be the Stronghold Builders Guidebook.  I know I promised this one last month, but I did the Goodman Games module Idylss of the Rat King instead.

And of course I’ll be keeping up with anything note worthy in the D&D gaming world.

I normally buy one product a quarter with the exception of the holiday season.  In the fourth quarter of 2004, the product I was waiting for the most was the Spell Compendium.  This quarter, it’s the product called Tome of Magic - Pact, Shadow and Truename Magic.

And if you can’t tell, the supplements that revolve around spells are my favorite.  My character as a kid was a magic-user so anytime something comes out like Tome of Magic, I’m pretty much certain to pick it up.

What I’m really looking forward to is using it to shape a major bad guy in my campaign.  While Truename and Pact magic sound interesting, Shadow Magic is the section I’ll probably gravitate to first.  And if you want to check out each of these four categories, you can check out Wizards.com’s February Preview.  It’s about half way down the page.

After flipping through the Spell Compendium, I was wondering what everyone’s thougts were on their favorite, or least favorite spells in the book.  Feel free to pipe in.

I know I promised you the Stronghold Builder’s Guidebook, but I have a personal reason for changing gears.  Instead, we’re going to look at a quality product from Goodman Games called Idylls of the Rat King.  This is the first in a series of adventures called Dungeon Crawl Classics.

When I was a kid, we never really role played well.  We didn’t know what it was called it at the time, but we dungeon crawled.  We went from room to room, clearing things out.  Several of the old Greyhawk modules catered to this and while most had a plot behind the module, we ignored it.  Goodman Games’ Dungeon Crawl Classics do the same thing.  They’re heavy on combat with less emphasis on NPC interaction and things always end up going down in a dungeon.

Not there isn’t a plot because there’s a good one.  The characters start up in a mining town (Silverton) where the silver caravans have been held up due to goblin raids.  Some aren’t your standard goblins because they’ve been infected by a wererat.  The goblins have taken up residence in an old abandoned silver mine.  Seems the leader has a grudge against the town, which adds an extra dimension to the whole thing. 

The module offers a few different hooks to get things started and you even get a solid history of the town.  The silver mine has four solid levels full of monsters and a handful of some interesting traps.  There’s also a ton of my favorite, secret doors.  And then of course at the end, you square off against the main bad guy.

All in all, this is a great adventure for both seasoned players and new players.  New players will like it because they’ll be able to get their tactics down without having to role play too much and seasoned players will recognize the old schoolness of the module and have pleasant flashbacks of their early days of Dungeons and Dragons.

Great stuff.

Skip Williams continues his series on illusions.  This is really some good stuff.  Illusions are just one of the ways for a DM to mess with his players, and knowing how to use them effectively makes the experience even more fun. 

The creators of the upcoming supermodule, Red Hand of Doom, sat down for an interview.  This is some really good reading and it got me excited about the product.  Dragons are “always” prevalent in my campaign, even at a lower level (usually it’s just a fly by to send shivers down the party’s spines) so I can set the stage.

So while I probably won’t put this into my campaign, it’ll be something I can pick up if I get lazy and want to take my players through something that’s canned.

Wizards recently posted their February product preview.  In it, there’s more information on the upcoming book Tome of Magic that’s on my must buy list.  They’re selling it almost as three mini books in one (for each of the three new forms of magic, Shadow, Pact and Truename).

There’s also a little more on Power of Faerun, which I’ll probably pass on.  If it was a region specific book, I might be more likely to pick it up because I run my campaign in the Forgotten Realms, but this doesn’t look like something I need.

They also discuss Complete Psionic.  I have a question for readers.  I’ve never been into Psionics, but I’d like to throw it into my campaigh.  Is this a companion book to the Expanded Psionic Handbook or can you just pick this new book and roll with Psionics?

Skip Williams recently posted the first installment of a series on illusions. As usual, this is some great stuff and in this part and the next, he covers the basics of illusions.

In June of 1976, Dragon magazine was born.  While it wasn’t the first stab at a magazine that supported Dungeons and Dragons, it’s precursor, called The Strategic Review was launched in 1975 and actually covered an array of gaming.  It was launched by Tactical Studies Rules, or as we know it, TSR.  The Strategic Review had more of a newsletter feel, where as Dragon magazine was TSR’s first attempt at a full blown periodical.

The cover is interesting.  You have a teal dragon with pink wings and a bright pink and orange backgroud.  Let’s just say their art has come a long way.

On page three, we have the publisher’s statement, which talks about the transition to a full blown magazine.  It also talks about how you can submit articles or art.

On page four, there’s a column on the newly created campaign setting of Lankmar.  Page five has some ads, one of which is by a magazine called Diplomacy World, which is on the classic board game Diplomacy.  The ad looks like (and probably was) it was typed on a typewriter.  Page seven has a column on using non-prime requisite character attributes.  1E never included non-weapon proficienies, and this looks like an early stab at coming up with rules related to what have basically become skill checks.

Later in the magazine, there’s a column on the compatibility of magic and science, and then one on the use of languages in the campaign.  There’s an ad for GenCon, which I believe still exists.  There’s a column on mapping out a wilderness setting for a campaign and there’s some new rules on expanding the old Illusionist class, which was basically a wizard who specialized in the illusion school.  The new rules gives Illusionists the use of some of the Magic-User spells and also expands on the experience level table from the Player’s Handbook.

There’s even a column by one of the icon’s of D&D, Gary Gygax.  In it, he talks about the board game Dungeon, which was a pretty fun game.  It basically allowed you to play in a D&D setting without the need for a Dungeon Master.  There’s also two pieces of fiction in the magazine.

In all, the magazine checks in at 30 pages, although one of those is the front cover.  On the back cover, it gives a teaser about the contents of the next issue.

D&D has definitely come a long way.  Now you’ve got full color art through out the magazine with a more “futuristic” layout (i.e. it was done a computer, not a printing press).  It’s definitely fun to go back and check these things out though.

I’m reading “Cell” by Stephen King and the premise of the book is that anyone who listens to their cell phone within a certain time is driven very insane.  So those who were lucky enough not to have cell phones aren’t that lucky after all, because they’re living out the end of the world.  The books a great read and I’m not quite half way through it but I was wondering if anyone’s ever tried running a Doomsday campaign.

So to take Stephen King’s other book, “The Stand,” you could have some nasty disease that only affects humans and humanoids so you have an end of the world type of feel.  Things get pretty desolate and very wild, cities are shells of what they used to be, that kind of thing.  New monsters take over, but a very small percentage of humanoids have a natural resistance so they get to live through the nightmare.

This would be more typical of a modern d20 campaign, but you could do it in a D&D setting as well.