Taking a leaf out of the excellent Dungeon Masters Guide 2, I've sent my players a questionnaire:-

Section A - in character. Reply as your character would.

1. Where do you see yourself in 5 years time?

2. What has been you greatest achievement?

3. Who or what do you hate?

4. Who or what do you love?

5. Who is most likely to betray you?

6. What is best in life?


Section B - in player. Reply as you would, and answers can be from both Toby and my own games.

1. What scene have you enjoyed the most so far in 4e?

2. What elements have bored you, or failed to keep your attention?

3. What part of our sessions in the whole, so from the moment you set out to the moment you get home, take too long?

4. What would you like more of?

5. Having played 4e a far bit now, what advice would you give a newbie player?

6. What advice would you give a newbie DM?

I've created a profile on the Wizards community portal, under... Sasha Bilton. If you are there, add me :)

I'm hoping that after a summer of little gaming I can get back into the swing of things very soon. I've been working on the next scenario for the D&D campaign, which I'm very excited about. It will see the fledgling heroes interacting with other Raiders Guild members and uses the city floor plan tile sets. There maybe opportunities to kill hippies. I'm also hoping that I'll be back working on Raiders Guild early next month, if promises are kept. I've now got 3 Raiders Guild adventure manuscripts, one of which is 80% laid out and the fourth maybe written by yours truly, with a lot of help from my friends.

In other news, I counted my Orc & Goblin Warhammer figures over the weekend. I've got 60 old Citadel 'Black orcs' with Halberds along with musicians, standard bearers, leaders and champions. They aren't usable as new Black Orcs, but as normal orcs with 2 handed weapons they work well. Oh and 30 wolf riders, 80 Goblin spearmen, 50 Goblin archers, 20 Orc archers and 10 spider riders. Nice.

I'm not going to GenCon this year. After numerous set backs and an extremely bad year personally I can't justify going and if I could, I simply couldn't afford to. This doesn't make me happy, especially since the best thing I found about GenCon, which surprised me, was the incredibly friendly warm people who populate it, on both sides of stalls.

So to all those I'll miss, have a great one and I desperately hope to rejoin you next year.

Hard Boiled Armies by One Bad Egg was the product that most pleased and excited me amongst the other excellent choices.

Some time back I heard of a meme that involved mixing D&D with China Mieville's fantasy city of New Crobuzon. The idea was to add 3 races to the city. I jotted down some notes after also reading the Monster Manual 2 but never wrote them up. I've got a slowish afternoon here at work, so...
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Like any RPG group I'm developing house rules for our D&D game...

Leveling.
Character may level at any time, during an extended rest (that's basically overnight to non fourthers) and must be done between sessions. So as long as you have enough XP to level and the games session ends with the characters getting some rest they will have gone up a level at the start of the next session. One last caveat, they must have new character sheet with them too at at the next session. If they forget or haven't done a new one and only have the previous levels, they have to use that until they remember it and have an extended rest.
The rational behind this, rather than the more traditional view that you have to train to level, is that I'm currently swept up in the 'fun is the whole of the law' movement. We're not teenagers anymore with vast quantities of disposable time, so the rewards have to come in thick when they do.

Traps.
Generally I'll try and describe how detected traps work, particularly if they have mechanical elements. If the characters disarming the trap describe how they are disarming the and are roughly correct in the method, they gain a +2 bonus to their thievery roll. If they are super confident then they need not roll at all and I decide if it works. This is therefore a good choice for very easy traps, which can still be fumbled or very hard traps that need a very high roll to disarm. This is really to give the party thinkers some extra shine time. I'm not worried about staying in character here, if the half-orc Barbarian has the winning solution to magical tree-trap, they should speak up.

XP, items & treasure.
If a player forgets to write done their new XP amount after a session, it stays at the previous amount. If the completely lose track of their XP they are reset back to the beginning of the level. Items and treasure picked up must be noted on character sheets, even if I've not revealed what the treasure actually is. A note saying bag of shinies from that dirty Kenku Assassin will do. Harsh, but you're meant to love these characters with every inch of your fiber. Ok, I admit this is because I'm likely to forgot the parties totals and treasures lists, so I'm delegating.

Myraid's Charm of Extending Wizard Utility 16
Daily, Arcane
Standard Action
Target : A Wizards Spell of 16th level of lower you cast.
Effect : The spell that is about expire at the end of this turn can be sustained as a Standard Action until the end of the encounter or 5 minutes has passed.

Utterly over-powered?

So, I've removed the space between the 'n' & ':' and it definitely works. The Title is larger for thumbnails and a certain logo has been added to the bottom. Thoughts?

After the baking sun and torrential rain of BBQ Saturday, Freya and I went to Dragonmeet South West yesterday and had a thoroughly enjoyable day. After wandering around the main hall we were treated to a demo game of Munchkin by Phil Masters no less. Freya snuck up from behind and won the game, which I think we all enjoyed. Freya doesn't ask for much considering she is a 10 year old, in fact I encourage her to be more vocal about her wants, so her I took her silence after the game to mean she was thinking about it. I suggested we looked into buying a copy, to which there was a vague nodding. So we did and played another 4 games, which she won 2, during which time she asked about expansions. She really enjoyed the game, even in 2 player mode and I suspect we might get my partner to play as even though she is rather ungeeky, she loves Dork Tower.

The convention was definitely a small acorn and I'm sure that with the right amount of promotion it could grown into a fine English oak. It was also good to see lots of people I only see at Dragonmeet.

Gakk'd from freeport_pirate - Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. Couldn't be bothered with just books, so a poem & short story got included along with anthologies of articles. Vaguely in order of age when I first came across them.

1. The Weirdstone of Brisingamen - Alan Garner
2. Lord Of The Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
3. Tunnels & Trolls - Ken St. Andre, et al
4. The BBC Microcomputer User Guide - John Coll
5. The second Corum series - Michael Moorcock
6. The C Programming Language - Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie
7. Rats In The Wall - H.P. Lovecraft
8. Fire and Ice - Robert Frost
9. The Stars My Destination (aka Tiger! Tiger!) - Alfred Bester
10. The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia - Ursula Le Guin
11. The Lord Of Light - Roger Zelazny
12. The Player Of Games - Iain M. Banks
13. No Gods, No Masters - edited by Daniel Guerin
14. Perdido Street Station - China Meville
15. Recipes for Disaster: An Anarchist Cookbook - anonymous

I took heed of what people said and the white text definitely needs to be framed, but drop shadow is just a little too cheesy, so I've gone for applying a stroke round the text. The font is used thoroughly through-out so I'm trying to stick to the no more than 3 fonts rule. Besides it's subtly similar to certain other fonts used be certain other D&D publishers. Anyway, here is a further revision...thumbs up or down?

Poll #1420439 Drop Shadow
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 13

Should I use drop shadow on the adventure title

Agnes Richter's jacket. I heard about this on the radio last night and it sounds practically designed for use in Cthulhu, Esoterrorists, Dresden Files, etc,.

An age ago, the tomb of an ancient chieftain vanished beneath the churning ocean waves. In less than a weeks time it will rise from the depths once again. Once in every generation is there a chance to uncover the forgotten secrets of the Sea Crypt.

Only the expert agents of the legendary Raiders Guild have the single minded determination to steal the hidden map from their eternal foes, the diabolical order of Archivists. The Guildmaster has unique knowledge of the terrible significance of the artifact that lays in this sunken tomb. The heroes must race against time, those who would thwart their mission and the horrible Icthian inhabitants of the crypt. Will they triumph? Or will the crypt become their own watery grave?!

Mission : Sea Crypt is the introductory adventure for 1st level characters that launches the Raiders Guild line of 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons material. Written by the Enine award winning author Robin D. Laws, this adventure supplement throws the characters immediately into the fight in a secret library beneath their city. The Raiders Guild offers a fresh and exiting take on traditional fantasy adventuring, for players and dungeon masters alike.

I have a burning desire to get in my way-back machine and run some Basic D&D, notably B4 : The Lost City, using the Rules Cyclopedia, which I'll go dig out of storage this weekend. I wonder how much you could get through in a Saturday? Certainly more the 4E, and I wonder how much fun it would be?

Now, to find some players...(hint hint)

With the introduction in 4E of minions, DMs have a way of having hordes of foes for damage dealers to wade through. However I've been looking at how you deal with the classic sentry situation. You want them to be taken out quickly if taken by surprise or using a powerful attack, but able to put up enough fight to be assigned guard duties.

So I'm toying with the idea of giving foes who have the additional keyword 'Sentries' a secondary hit point note, like the following
hp 50, 4D
This basically means the foe has 50 normal hit points, but can also be reduced to 0 hit points immediately by any attack that resolves using at total of 4 dice. So that's a 2W encounter power, plus a rogues sneak attack (+2d6), a ranger successfully making a Sudden Strike (1W + 2W) against their hunters quarry (+1d6) or a warlock casting Flames of Phlegethos (+3d10) against a cursed (+1d6) opponent. This effect also allows others who specialize in Big Sticks to get in on the act because they are wielding double dice weapons, for example a fighter wielding a Falchion gets +2d4 x2W when using Steel Serpent Strike. Obviously critical hits and magic items add dice to increase the ability to take out sentries.

The question is, will it work in practice?

The 3.0 version of the iPhone OS will support micropayment transactions and peer 2 peer Bluetooth connections. I really hope Upper Deck and Wizards are investing in iPhone development because those two techs combined have collectible trading 'card' games written all over them. That's a piece of action I could get *really* behind. If. I. Was. So. Damn. Busy. Already.

This is the cover art for the first Raiders Guild adventure, Mission : The Sea Crypts by robin_d_laws. I absolutely love it and now can't wait to see what Pascal, the artist, has in store for Mission : Tower In The Sky, the second adventure, by _grimtales_.

(For the curious, you can find out more about the Raiders Guild, their mission and the Archivists here - http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=62432)

I'm fired up to work on Axe Initiative stuff over the weekend again after a fantastically invigorating game of 4E last night. I'll write up more, but my character, Gingel the Dwarf Rogue finally managed to be striker. badusernametag is a very good, involved and passionate but impartial DM, fun is going to be had.