Dungeons and Dragons Blog

This month’s issue of Dungeon magazine has double the nostalgia.  The biggest portion of the magazine consists of the the latest installment of the Savage Tide campaign path and it’s a good one.  The party sets sail aboard the Sea Wyvern en route to the Isle of Dread.  Along the way, you run into storms, reefs, currents and even the Hidden Shrine of Tomoachan, which was the location of a first edition D&D module (C1).  Of course you have to wait until next month to actually set foot on the Isle of Dread.  I can’t wait.

The second adventure is called the Sword of Dragonlake and it reads a lot like a murder mystery.  It’s an open ended urban adventure that I couldn’t really get into.  Maybe it was just my mood but if I change my mind on this one after rereading it, I’ll let you know.

The final adventure, Vlindarian’s Vault, is a high level adventure that’s Beholder heavy.    It seems the leader of a hive of beholders has kidnapped a silver dragon and the dragon’s mate enlists the players to help free him. 

The last bit of news is that Monte Cook will no longer be writing the Dungeoncraft column.  In his place is Wolfgang Baur, who I’m confident will be able to fill in nicely for Cook.  I became familiar with Baur’s work when I made a last minute decision to pick up his first Open Design partron project, Steam and Brass.  For a contribution, a patron can take part in the various stages of a custom built adventure and contribute to the ultimate design.  Baur is now looking for patron’s for his second project and if it’s anywhere near as good as Steam and Brass, which was an excellent piece of work, it’s well worth the price of admission.  I ponied up this time around and it’s fun getting on the ground floor on this one.

Talk about one stop shopping.  I’ve always been partial to RPGnow.com for my D&D downloads but only because they have the old original D&D products.  I did start checking out DrivethruRPG.com when I saw they had some of the old Twilight 2000 products available for download.  Now the two companies are going to merge so you’ll only have to go to one place for all of your RPG downloading needs.

My main character as a kid, Dron the Mighty, was a 526 level magic-user.  Don’t ask me how he got that high of a level, because even I don’t remember.  He had a magically domed fortress on the positive material plan that was miles long.  His son , Dron II, also reached triple digits as far as levels.  Then in a 24 hour marathon game session with my cousin (he also had guys that high), we took on some ultimate force and nobody won.  The creature perished, but so did all of our guys.  It just wasn’t fun anymore so we wrapped everything up and started over.

This column talks about how to cope with ultrahigh level characters.  It’s a pretty good read just because I remember having to deal with these things so many years ago.  Now I have a hard enough time finding time for a game much less having characters who are epic level.

My copy of Ptolus came in the mail today and all I have to say is, Wow.  It’s by far the most elegant role playing product I’ve ever seen and while I haven’t gotten into the meat yet, based on what I’ve heard, I won’t be disappointed.  Even if I never play a campaign in the City by the Spire, I’m really going to enjoy reading this book.  A review really can’t be done because this book is so huge but as I piece things together and read through it, I’ll be sure to share my thoughts.

I just got my copy of Complete Mage a couple of days ago and I’ve had a chance to dig through it pretty deeply.  The premise of the book is that it allows players to greatly expand their options for arcane magic.  While Complete Arcane isn’t absolutely neccesary, a lot of the information in Complete Mage builds on what’s in Complete Arcane so to get the most for your money, I recommend that you also own Complete Arcane.

The first chapter of the book is on Fundamentals.  The nature of magic is explored as well as an indepth look at arcane magic.  There’s a cool section on each of the spell schools, including what the personality and philosophy of a given magic school specialist should have.  There’s some interesting stuff to really round out a character and I found myself making notes regarding some minor changes on some of the NPCs I’ve already created for my campaign so they fit better within the book’s description.  There’s also a section on arcane archetypes.  While these aren’t neccesarily different classes, they do give you ideas for pointing a magic user in a specific direction.

Chapter two provides character options.  The first section gives you arcane options for each character class to mix in a little magical variety to spice things up.  For example, one option for the Paladin is the Curse Breaker.  Instead of getting the remove disease ability at sixth level, you can opt to produce remove curse instead.  There’s a section with several new feats, including a new type of feat.  The reserve feat is unique to Complete Mage and are used to augment a spell like ability the character already has. 

Chapter three are your prestige classes.  There are eleven new ones and my favorites are the enlightened spirit and the ultimate magus.  The enlightened spirit is a warlock who’s seen the light and has turned to good.  The ultimate magus is sort of the super mage.  It’s a mix between a wizard and sorcerer so you get the best of both worlds when it comes to casting both innate and learned spells.

Chapter Four are the new spells and there’s quite a few of them.  Although honestly, there’s nothing in this section that really sticks out.  I’m probably the last person who will tell you that you can have too many spells, but that be where we’re at.  I saw a few spells that looked interesting, but nothing that jumped out at me and made say I had to have it for an NPC or a bad guy.

Chapter Five deals with arcane items and there’s some cool stuff in here.  The Ring of Instant Escape looked interesting.  It allows the wearer to escape particularly nasty spells.  The Rod of Spell Channeling appears particularly nasty if you have someone who is linked with a familiar and this could be really useful in conjunction with the Familiar Belt detailed in the book.  This section out of all of them gave me the most ideas to test my players.

Chapter Six discusses arcane adventures.  It provides some themes and then it also has a nice list of 100 adventure ideas.  There’s also some magical locations listed, like Bigby’s Tomb, Boccob’s Reading Room, and an eternal vortex, amongst other things.

I give Complete Mage four stars out of five but I almost gave it a three because I wasn’t really impressed with the spells.  Fortunately the other areas picked it up.  It’s useful and I found some tidbits in here that can help me and got the brain turning.  If you don’t own Complete Arcane, you might want to start with that one first though to get the full effect.

Alright, I saw an advertisement for Ptolus not that long ago (probably in a Dungeon Magazine) and needless to say, this looks very cool.  It’s also very expensive.  So if any one has bought and has any thoughts (like do you get your money’s worth), please let me know what you think in the comments section.

As a dungeon master, I’m always looking to cut corners in my campaign.  Time is tight, so if I can pull something from another product and use, I do so.  So I drop the Keep on the Borderlands into Faerun and that’s the first chapter.  Later, I use the Slavers modules and then the Giants modules play a big part.  So I’m usually set for about the first 12-15 levels for the party.  After that, it’s jumble of undocumented ideas because I’ve never had the time play things out that far.

Then the latest issue of Dungeon Magazine was delivered.  You have the second installment of the Savage Tide campaign path which I think is shaping out to be the best of three campaign paths.  And then you have a neat adventure that takes place within a wizard’s academy.  It’s the final adventure of the three that really caught my eye though.

The Heart of Hellfire Mountain has two things that are prevalent in the later parts of my campaign.  Devils and a lot of giants.  In this case it’s Fire Giants and a Pit Fiend as the big bad guy.  This is a very cool adventure and I’ve already figured out a way to slip it to what I’m trying to do.

I ran across this supplement at RPGnow.com’s Edge.  It was an impulse buy, but it turned out to be a good one because I really like Octavirate’s Creature Weekly.  And the product is just like it sounds.  Each week, you get a handful of unique creatures that you can drop into your campaign.  It’s a nice way to keep your campaign fresh and if you play a more free style campaign, you can pick and choose what you want to use and drop it immediately into the game you’re running.

I picked up volume one just to check out.  In volume one, you get four new creatures, along with some amazing detail and a ton of templates.  A really cool feature is that the product gives you ideas to drop the new creatures into an alternative genre.  So if you’re playing D20 Modern, you have a detailed description on how to run the creature.  I also enjoyed the artwork.

There’s four new creatures in the first volume.  You get the Erodaemon, the Deadgem, the Platypus (both common and dire) and the Quan-Ko.  If I had to pick a favorite, the Dire Platypus is something I can see using in a one of my campaigns. 

They’re now up to seven volumes and the price is very reasonable (they’re on sale for $2.40 per).  What’s nice is, you check out which new creatures are in which volume and pick and choose.  Like any supplement though, you might buy the product and find two of the four creatures are something you wouldn’t be interested in, but you can say that about any supplement.  There’s stuff you’ll use and stuff you won’t.  But for a couple of bucks, this is definitely a value.  I can see myself picking up a few more of these for sure.

I’ve said it before, but I love magic.  Wizards are usually the center piece of most of my campaigns, so that’s why I’m considering Complete Mage a must buy.  It’s the first “new” D&D product I’ve bought since Fiendish Codex but the last time I was really excited about a product was when Tome of Magic came out.

The plan is to get it and a review on it up shortly thereafter.  With baseball season winding down, that’s more of a possibility and I’m hoping to get back on a regular schedule here soon.  Heck, I might even try to play a game.