Thanks be to Thor and whatever other gods are controlling the weather; we made it to Ft. Wayne this year! It’s 12:33 am and since I haven’t gone to bed yet, I’m going to say it’s Thursday. (It’s technically Friday.) I wanted to be sure to get the news out to all the folks who don’t follow me on Twitter, so here’s the excitement of the first full day of DDXP and the introduction of the new edition of D&D.

Seminar:  Charting the Course: An Edition for All Editions

Loads of folks turned out for this! Of course, everyone is excited/interested about the new edition, but part of the good attendance also is because the seminars were nicely nestled in the time slot between game slots, so you didn’t have to choose between seminar or a game. Sweet!

The panel was moderated by Greg Bilsland and featured Monte Cook, Mike Mearls, and Jeremy Crawford of Wizards of the Coast. We were told we could blog everything except if someone took of their shirt. (Nobody did. Darn.)

Goals for the New Edition

The first thing they spoke about was what they were hoping to achieve with the new edition:

Monte wants to distill down what’s best about all the editions of D&D. He also mentioned the importance of the DM/player relationship; it’s a core part of the game that the player and DM should be able to communicate and be creative together. Also, fireballs.

Mike mentioned the importance of offering a wide variety of options for players to explore the world the way they want to explore. The shared language of D&D is also vital; keeping the culture and stories of D&D alive so that everyone can understand the story of the dread gazebo.

Jeremy wants the new game to be a toolbox for creating worlds and stories and hopes to see a rebalancing of the game between story & mechanics.

How It Will Work

Regarding how the game will be designed, Monte said that they are creating an underlying foundation or core game, which is D&D distilled to its essence. The core game can be played by itself, or you can build your own game using the different modules.

If you like a tactical game with lots of maps, miniatures, attacks of opportunity and the like, you can use modules to have that game.

If you want extensive skills and ways to customize your character, you can have that game.

If you want BOTH, you can have that game.

Modules & Balance

Achieving balance in a game that is so modular and flexible is a challenge, but Jeremy said that their vision is that the core game has seeds for each module. Using the modules just builds on that seed.

Monte’s example was of a fighter.

In the core game, a fighter does more damage and takes more damage than any other class. (As a fighter tends to do!)

If you prefer the fighter of 4e, where you have different fighting powers that allow you to move monsters around, push them, etc, there will be a module that will allow you to build that kind of fighter and play him at the same table as the core fighter. And they’d be balanced.

Monte also pointed out that as a DM, you could say up front, “I’m running X kind of game,” where X is tactical or X is political intrigue or X is exploration, and your players will then be able to create characters that will interact well with the world you want to build.

3 Pillars of D&D

Mike mentioned that they see the three pillars of D&D as Roleplay/Interaction, Combat, and Exploration. That covers about 90% of what goes on in D&D, minus the rules lawyering (that last one was pointed out by someone during Q&A at the end). They think a lot about how they can incorporate all the things that people want to do at the table, without making a rule for everything.

Monte recognized that some PCs will be good at exploration and not so good at combat, and vice versa. But it’s important to have a firm role for each class. If you have a player who just wants to kick ass, you can help that person create that PC.

Continuing on the classes discussion, Mike added that you can be a stabby rogue (more combat-heavy) or a sneaky rogue (more exploration heavy). Monte added that bards can still kick ass.

High / Epic Level Play

High level play was the next subject and Monte spoke about how fans of D&D often say that the game breaks at a certain level. That level depends on the edition and whether or not the game actually breaks or just becomes drastically different is up for debate. He said that 4e did a good job of making epic level play a different experience.

After admitting they haven’t done much work yet on high level play, Monte said they want to keep the game manageable at high levels. Maybe swap a bunch of abilities from low levels for a single, high-level ability and make things a little less complex. (As someone who hates having pages and pages and pages of character sheet, I can appreciate this.)

Of course, Monte added, there are things you want to do at high levels. You want to build your own castle, you want to have followers, you want to mix with royalty. These are things they hope to include. Mike added that you can still keep going into dungeons and killing monsters, or maybe gods.

Monsters

On to monsters! A lot about monsters ties in to player advancement. Monte said they’d like to keep the iconic monsters like orcs, goblins, kobolds and the like in the game for a long time. But they don’t want a level 1 orc, level 2 orc, level 3 orc. They want a group of orcs to be really scary at level 1 but still significant at level 8, albeit in larger numbers.

So instead of the fighter’s attack bonus going up, up, up every level, maybe it goes up every few levels and he gets other things at the other levels. So you can go back to that orc and know that this is the same exact orc that nearly slaughtered you at level 1. It gives you a bar to see your character advance.

One of the big pushes for the new edition of D&D is putting out an amazing DungeonMaster’s Guide. Mike had the best quip on this (it may be a paraphrase, live-tweeting is hard!): “We don’t need rules for everything. We need good DM advice.”  The DM plays such a huge role in how the game is shaped and if the system supports the DM with advice, it empowers the DM and makes the game better without adding more rules.

Playtesting & Your Feedback

Jeremy spoke a bit about playtesting, which has been going on for about 9 months. One thing that has come up again and again is how diverse people’s tastes are about D&D. Clearly, D&D players love their game, but everyone has a different idea about what the optimal D&D game is. This is something that’s gone all the way back to 1st edition.

When playtest feedback comes back, two people at the same table might have opposite opinions. Player A wants more combat while Player B wanted more interaction.

Monte said that because of these factors they’ve been focusing on the story of D&D. What is a fighter? What is a wizard? What makes the D&D wizard different from say, Gandalf or a spellcaster in Skyrim? Figuring out whether you get a +2 or +3 is the easy part, he said. Making a D&D ranger that feels like a D&D ranger is harder. Is that class more Aragorn or more Drizzt?

Monte said that the most important feedback you can give if you’re able to playtest the new edition is “Does this feel like D&D to you?” and “Does your class feel like it should?”

What’s Your Game?

The final question before moving into the audience Q&A portion was “What kind of campaign would you play in the new D&D?”

Monte said he’d use minis, but without the super tactical stuff, mostly just to visualize where things are when needed. There’d be lots of social interaction and exploration that relies on the ingenuity of the players, not die rolls. Players should think about where to search in a room, rather than just rolling a die for Search. He likes to reward his players for being smart.

Mike would start with the core game and then introduce modules later, adding them on a session by session basis. For example, if there was a large scale war, there’d be a module to help run that particular gaming session (or series of sessions). Mike doesn’t want a lot of rules, so he’d move modules in and out depending on what was happening for that particular game.

Jeremy agreed that he’d be the same as Mike. He doesn’t want to pick one game and stick with it. One night he’d do no minis, no die rolls, all talking. The next game might be the full on tactical game with the grid, minis, and tons of dice.

Audience Q&A

Q: To what degree will multiclassing be available? Or will that be mainly about skills/feats/etc?

A (Monte): We want both to be an option. So you could be a fighter that is okay at interaction. Or you could make a bigger commitment to multiclass.

A (Mike): The rogue could learn some stuff about Arcane Lore, but he wouldn’t be able to cast spells unless he multiclassed into Wizard.

Q: How does the new edition appeal to the new player who has no attachments to a previous edition?

A (Mike): The core will be simple enough for a newbie to try out because it focuses on the story first and interacting with the DM.

(E’s note: I started with D&D 3.5 and for me, looking at stat blocks and all the numbers intimidated the crap out of me. Coming into D&D with a more streamlined system – even say, Essentials – would have been easier. Of course, that’s me. Everybody is different!)

Q: What steps are being taken to give creativity back to the players?

A (Monte): Players can be empowered to have more answers to the DM’s question: “What are you going to do?” There are limitless answers and everything is very open now. Fewer rules means that the DM is empowered to handle imaginative players, too.

Q (ChattyDM): Will there be random charts and tables to help the DM?

A (Monte): Yes, for the DM who likes the chaotic nature of rolling to see what is living in the Temperate Swamp, you’ll be able to roll to find out. We don’t need tables for everyone, but the DM who wants them will have them.

Q: Say everyone shows up to the DM’s place and they want to kill shit, but the DM had planned a RP-heavy session… is it easy to switch up?

A (Mike): On the fly, it’s pretty easy to slide in a module to change things. Use minis, don’t use minis, big fight, little fight, no fight.

Q: How are you addressing the needs of organized play?

A (Mike): We’ll have an agreed-upon standard so folks know what they’re getting into for each session. There aren’t any specifics yet, though.

Q: Will one player really have fun with the stripped down rules while another one has a more complex character if they’re at the same table?

A (Monte): I ran a game for two 4e guys, two 3e guys, and one who hadn’t played since 1982. The 1e guy didn’t want a complex character sheet; he liked it simple. He wanted to know which orc to hit and then he hit it and had fun. With this system, if that guy eventually wanted a more complex character, we could change it for him and build one.

A (Jeremy): If you have two fighters, for example, one fighter might prefer to just do a lot of damage while the other might want to do less damage but be able to slide monsters around the grid.

Q: At higher levels, won’t the complex characters take way more time to do their turn?

A (Monte): We really want to keep combat moving quickly, so it will prevent that guy from spending 10 minutes on his turn.

Q: Do you think D&D will start to take itself too seriously?

A (Mike): I think D&D needs chaos in it, whether it’s a funny moment, something totally silly, or something very serious.

A (Jeremy): Art in the new edition will have a more grounded approach and PCs that appear real, not like superheroes. We have some halflings that look like they ate a few too many muffins and adventurers that barely survived their last battle. Very diverse art.

Q: How will the 3 pillars compete in this edition?

A (Mike): Balancing each class is important. We want to be sure that everyone at the table feels useful in some way and has something to contribute to the party.

The Playtest

Immediately after the seminar, I went to my mustering station and was assigned a table for the WotC Secret Special adventure, which was a playtest of the new edition core rules. I didn’t know anybody at my table (at least until Mike of SlyFlourish sat down!) but we were all excited to try the new iteration of D&D.

While waiting on our DM to arrive, I was scrolling through my Twitter stream and saw a tweet from Baldman Games that if any table yelled “THE BALDMAN RULES” they’d get Monte Cook as their DM. Since I hadn’t heard any tables yelling, I showed the tweet to my table and we all sounded the chorus. Sure enough, Monte himself came to our table to run our game!

If you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed my silence for the next few hours. Here’s why:

1. Monte Cook. Srsly, do I need more reasons?
2. I couldn’t publish any crunchy details about the game, including any pics that might show character sheets. (Sorry!)
3. Our game was pretty freakin’ awesome.

Now, you don’t need your very own Monte Cook to make the new D&D great. Of course, having an awesome DM helps, but that’s true for pretty much every game out there.

Here are some of the things that struck me about this game:

There was a LOT of talk at the table. In character at times! I’ve never been at a D&D table where players were more invested in figuring out their next move.

On that topic, your next move isn’t on your character sheet. You don’t go paging through all your stuff thinking, “Well, I could Bluff this guy.” Nope. We were doing what we thought our characters should do, even if that involved our very NOT charismatic half-orc fighter trying to be a charismatic leader of a band of skeptical savage orcs.  Multiple times. In other games, it’s “Okay, who has the highest Charisma? You? Okay, you go talk to those orcs and get them to help us.”

Everything was fun and fast and fluid. I didn’t feel like the game got bogged down at any time during our session, even when we had a few rules questions for Monte. Things just happened and they flowed with the story and the story was awesome because we made it that way.

Thanks again for an awesome game Monte & friends!

…and thank you, intrepid Reader, for making it to the end of this marathon post.

Before you comment, understand this: This is my house and we play by my rules here. If you have negative things to say, they won’t make it past moderation. If you’d like to be a dick, please go do it elsewhere.

This month’s article was inspired by D&D’s special announcement. Unless you’ve had your head stuck in a dice bag, you might have heard that Wizards of the Coast announced their plans to reinvest their energy into Dungeons & Dragons. (You can read What We Know About 5th Edition on ENWorld for the latest updates.) The news was picked up by several major media outlets including Forbes, The New York Times, and Yahoo! News.

From a gamer’s perspective, this news shook tables and shattered pencils. Some people are excited. Others? Betrayed. Most players either had (or have) an opinion about the news regardless of whether or not they read the articles. Then, the edition wars started. 4th Edition versus 3.5. Why Pathfinder is a better game than Dungeons & Dragons (or vice versa). From an industry perspective? Same thing happened.

The fate of Dungeons & Dragons affects everyone in the hobby on some level. For me, it often serves as a point of reference when I’m explaining my freelancing efforts. Most non-gamers haven’t heard of Pathfinder or Vampire: the Masquerade. They don’t know the difference between 4th Edition and GURPS or Savage Worlds. What they do know, however, is the essence of Dungeons & Dragons from either a “we sit around the table, tell stories, and roll dice” or a fantasy perspective. It’s entirely understandable that opinions are rampant, speculative, and emotional. Unlike other hobby games, millions of people play this game. Millions. The reality of D&D’s marketshare is exciting, depressing, and a punch to the gut for anyone on the industry side of things.

Gamers aren’t the only ones who get upset when something changes. In sports, there are people who know stats, play fantasy football, or bicker over calls from referees. There are rules on different levels (high school, college, pro) and for the most part it’s easy to understand what the game’s about and dig deeper if you need to. Tribalism occurs in football around specific teams. Some are tried-and-true fans and others are fair weather who’ll only support a team when they’re winning. A player screws up? People lose their minds. They yell and scream and get pissed off. The interesting thing, though, is that most fans aren’t on a team. They’re bystanders. So, if someone pisses you off when they’re talking about your beloved Packers, all you have to do is stop watching or have another beer. Right?

Hobby game edition wars exist because tribes form up around systems and settings. No matter how hard you may try, there is no possible way to convince someone who loves their twenty-year old system that it sucks. Companies know and understand that edition wars take place. Some turn a blind eye; others embrace them. However, companies have legitimate reasons why they want to update a game that has nothing to do with intentionally hurting fans. Maybe they want to modernize a setting. Maybe they’re hoping to engage existing players in crowdsourcing, like what White Wolf Publishing did for the twentieth edition of Vampire: the Masquerade. Or maybe? They want to attract new players. Regardless of why they’re doing it, there’s no possible way a company will make every player happy. (Anyone who’s worked in customer service knows this.) Without players, this hobby will stagnant. Without new players? It’ll eventually crumble into dust as we get older. Hobby gaming will become “grandma’s game.” For all these reasons and more, public visibility of games — whether they’re Dungeons & Dragons or Zombie Dice or Monopoly or whatever — is a good thing.

In hobby gaming, we have something special. Something unique. We — freelancers included — are the players. We’re the guys who go out on the field and toss the ball. Why shouldn’t we put our game face on and encourage spectators or ask new players to come off the bench?

As a freelancer, you have to balance your love of a game with the work that you do. I’m not going to preach to you or demand that you watch what you say. We all have to make our own decisions about what we can reveal publicly. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, speculate or participate, the point I’m trying to make here is that becoming a general in an edition war is not necessarily a good thing. That level of animosity literally scares people for several reasons, especially if you’re overly negative or trying to be sarcastic and it isn’t received well. If you don’t see anything wrong with your comments? Awesome! That’s your deal. But I have to ask: when was the last time you invited someone new to sit at your table? What was the last game you picked up that wasn’t your usual fare?

Companies love freelancers who hand assignments in on time and who are willing to promote their efforts. In my experiences, they also like a freelancer who knows when to set aside the fan and be professional when they need to. You’re the master (or mistress) of your own destiny. Own it. All I suggest, is that you abandon the edition wars and keep your eye on the prize: making good, playable games. After all, is that what freelancers are supposed to be all about?

So instead, drawing on my experience with the game and my thoughts about how WotC has handled things with D&D of late, I thought instead I would share my thoughts on what 5th Edition will be like.

It Won’t Be Called 5th Edition

I know this sounds a bit odd, but I suspect that WotC won’t call it D&D 5th Edition. Whether it’ll be called Advanced D&D, or D&D Master Edition, or D&D Ultimate Edition, or what have you, 5th Edition is too much of a phrase with negative connotations for them to use. People were irritated with they called their revision of 3rd Edition 3.5. Then 4E pushed a lot of people away. WotC will want to minimize the potential bad feelings that a 5th Edition name will bring.

There’s precedence for it, of course. When D&D moved from the original 1974 chapbooks to the Advanced D&D/Basic D&D split, the changes in the game were significant, but they didn’t refer to it as a new edition, specifically. They acknowledged the differences with a new title, but they didn’t call it 2nd Edition. Likewise, when the game was re-released in the mid-90s, with the black book covers, it wasn’t touted as 2.5 or 3rd edition. In fact, they didn’t even call it 2nd Edition any morel they just called it Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

If I were WotC, I would follow this model, just bringing out new books and calling it Dungeons and Dragons. They’ve talked about wanting to get past edition wars and splintering groups, and just giving the game back its original name is one way to do that.

It Will Have Some Backwards Compatibility

When 3rd Edition came out, a conversion guide was available. I was playing in a 2nd Edition game at the time, and, by following that guide, we were able to keep playing with relatively little difficulty.

When 4E came out, the game designers basically said, “this game is really different than the last version. You’ll probably be better off either starting a new game, or just doing the best you can in terms of coming up with a race/class combo that will help you approximate your old character.” They cited as the reason for this the fact that the conversion process from 2nd edition to 3rd edition was kind of clunky.

I agree with this, but it really ticked off a lot of people. There could certainly have been some more attention paid to how this was handled. D&D 4E was a hard sell, and I think 5E is going to be even harder, as it feels much too soon for things to be changed. One way they can really assuage the feelings of people is to try and handhold through the process of conversion.

I’m not honestly sure how successfully they can do this. 3rd Edition and 4E are very different games, and people have really taken sides on which is better. As you know if you’ve been reading my columns, I love 4E, and my players love it, too. But I know not everyone does. This may be the greatest challenge WotC faces – how to please those on both sides of the edition war.

WotC Will Really Listen to Their Audience & Play Well with Others

Okay, this is an easy one, as they’ve already pretty much said half of this, but it bears mentioning. One of the criticisms leveled at WotC is that they basically ignored peoples’ feelings about what was important in the game. Obviously, this isn’t true, as their playtesters had tremendous say over what went into the game – playtesters always do, after all. But when people feel like their voice has been ignored and they’ve been marginalized, they turn away. Which, of course, is why Paizo now has so many former WotC customers buying their products.

One of the single biggest mistakes that *I* think WotC made was in letting folks who loved 3rd Edition slip through their fingers. If they had worked more closely with Paizo to make Pathfinder an official D&D product, think of how much stronger D&D would be right now. They could have Paizo putting out D&D Pathfinder for those who wanted to stay with 3rd edition rules (which they essentially are anyway) and they could be putting out 4E for people like me who felt that 3rd Edition had major flaws. It could’ve been a best of both worlds situation.

I feel that, by cutting back on the possibility of other companies putting out 4E products, they made people perceive them as arrogant. “We have D&D, and our D&D is the only official D&D, so you need our products.” Instead, people turned to a game they essentially already owned and enjoyed updates and changes to the system.
It’s really a shame, as Dragon and Dungeon are great magazines, and Paizo was doing a damned good job producing them. I still love what comes out for them now, and I think that DDI is a great investment, but I know many people don’t.

There Will Be a Much Bigger Emphasis on Role-playing…Somehow

I completely disagree with the idea that 4E had less emphasis on role-playing than earlier editions of D&D. The race section of the 4E PHB is about as long and as robust as the sections in earlier Player’s Handbooks, if not more so in some cases. Pull out any Player’s Handbook, from any edition, and they’re all essentially about the rules you need to play the game, with some notes on how you might role-play a particular race.

What is true is that the combat rules are much more strategy oriented, but I love that aspect. My players and I love describing what our monsters and characters are doing in combat to match the mechanics of what’s happening behind the scenes. And it’s no excuse to say that powers have a certain description and that limits you. The Warden in my game describes his character’s “Treacherous Ice” power as writhing undergrowth impeding his foes, and no one bats an eye.

Nevertheless, in an effort to put an end to those complaints, I suspect the next version of D&D will have much more emphasis on role-playing. It’s just a shame that 4E, which gave us ideas that reward RP vs. combat, like skill challenges, quest XPs, magic item like rewards that aren’t magic items (boons, favors, etc.) and more, still gets accused of being anti-RP. I just don’t get it, and I doubt I ever will.

In the End

Ultimately, whatever I predict now, and whatever the next iteration of D&D becomes, it just doesn’t matter.

There are people who will refuse to buy in, because they were alienated by 4E.

There are people who will refuse to buy in, because they love 4E, and they’ll feel betrayed.

And there are people like me, who’ll take a look, probably end up loving it, and wonder how they ever lived without it.

And in the end, if the new D&D comes, and we don’t like it, it doesn’t somehow invalidate the games and versions of D&D that we do choose to play. If I don’t like the direction 5E (or whatever it ends up being called) takes, I have plenty of 4E products to tell stories with. I couldn’t use every monster out there in a single campaign if I tried. There are more races, classes, feats, powers, and ideas than I could use up in 10 campaigns or more.

So if you love D&D 4E as I do, don’t despair. It’s not the end of the world. No WotC Police came to truncheon the players who chose to keep playing 3rd Edition, and none will be showing up for us.

I have hope that, whatever direction D&D takes, going into the future, it will be what Mike Mearls says they want to make it: “a game that rises above differences of play styles, campaign settings, and editions, one that takes the fundamental essence of D&D and brings it to the forefront of the game…unmistakably D&D, but one that can easily become your D&D, the game you want to run and play.”

Your Turn

How’re you feeling about the news of 5E? Hopeful? Ambivalent? Betrayed? Is there anything you hope they’ll get rid of? Bring back? Preserve? Let us all know.

The announcement of the new edition of Dungeons & Dragons came out today in the NY Times. It promises to capture the hearts and minds of all D&D players, young and old, no matter which edition they thought was best.

My Challenge For You

In your discussions of “5e” (or whatever it ends up being called), stay positive.

We all love slaying dragons. We all love exploring dungeons. Let’s focus on the positive aspects of what make us LOVE a game rather than talking about the new game in the light of how much you hate (your least favorite edition).

Think Of It This Way

When you meet a new romantic interest, you don’t immediately start in telling them how they can be the exact opposite of this girl/guy you dated that you totally hated.

“OMG, and you’d BETTER not leave your beard clippings in the sink! Howard did that and it is SO DISGUSTING. I can’t stand beard clippings!”

“I could not STAND how my ex-girlfriend used to leave her half-empty coffee cups all over the damn house. Seriously, if you can’t understand how to use a goddamn SINK, we will never fall in love!”

Sounds pretty rude, doesn’t it?

Wizards of the Coast is Listening

If you want to be heard, if you want to be respected, if you want to have your views taken into consideration, wrap them in things positive. Wrap them in the love you have for your game. Wrap them in the respect you have for the men and women who work long hours to try to make a game that makes thousands of people like us happy.

Leave your old, old, old edition war drama in 2011. Let’s make 2012 the year of awesome.

More D&D “5e” News:

• ENWorld
• Critical Hits
• WotC
• Baldman Games (DDXP)

Click to view on Amazon.com.

I have a long history with the fictional town of Neverwinter. The first MMORPG I ever played was Neverwinter Nights, back on AOL. I adored the first Neverwinter Nights stand-alone PC game, and, whenever I got a Forgotten Realms product, I would smile when I saw Neverwinter mentioned. My city, I would always think.

When the Forgotten Realms campaign guide for 4E came out, the first section I flipped to was the North, waiting to see what changes had occurred in Neverwinter. I was shocked to find that Neverwinter had been destroyed in the years of the Spellplague. My city? Destroyed? A sad fate!

So when I heard that the new campaign setting for 4E in 2011 was going to be Neverwinter, I blinked. How did that work? We already had a Forgotten Realms campaign setting. Why did Neverwinter get its own book? And wasn’t it destroyed?

Having now read the new Neverwinter Campaign Setting, I’m pleased to say that my city is back.

Overview

I’m going to try to review this book without giving away too many of the details that make this setting exciting. As many of the Campaign Setting books do, this one begins with an overview of what defines the setting and sets it apart.
Neverwinter is meant to be a low-level campaign. All of the threats presented within are threats that can be tackled within the Heroic tier of play; none of the major villains are unassailable epic powers. The book encourages the DM to begin a new campaign, with characters built at first level, and makes good use of the Character Theme rules that first popped up in Dark Sun to give characters flavor and to tie them immediately to the setting.

The game has a frontier feel. There is law and order, but it’s harsh and rather arbitrary. Like most of 4E Forgotten Realms, one shouldn’t expect Elminster to pop up and save the day; the characters are on their own, and they can make a major difference.

The game has a heavy intrigue feel. Many major NPCs are not what they seem, or serve masters other than the ones they publicly proclaim for. Even the most public and obvious stabilizing force in the region has an agenda and may be someone the PCs decide must be removed.

All in all, the book presents a dangerous place, currently in a very delicate balancing act. Even the slightest push could start events in motion, and, once they begin, it’s likely to be a roller coaster ride.

Let Me Tell You About My Character

There’s a lengthy section on creating a character which gives lots of interesting new options. In the Dark Sun book, 4E introduced the idea of a Character Theme. This has been presented as something just as important as race and class, and it is used to excellent effect here. Each theme provides not only powers and abilities, but also a motivation to be adventuring in Neverwinter, information your character possesses about the setting, and later plot tie-ins. Sidebars in later sections have information about how to tie the various themes into people, events, places, and adventures that the region offers.

This section provides other options, such as rules for playing Gold Dwarves, Shield Dwarves, Moon Elves, Sun Elves, Wild Elves, and Wood Elves by varying racial abilities from the norm (and including plenty of role-playing tips for these variants). It provides special Clerical Domain rules, with Domains based on specific deities, rather than on elements like Sun and Storm. And it introduces a new Wizard build, the Bladesinger, which harkens way back to my 2nd Edition days. The Bladesinger looks like a pretty kick ass class variant, and I may have to create one in the near future to give it a try.

Splintered Society

There then follows a length chapter on Factions and Foes. This is the real meat and potatoes of the book, and it’s extremely well developed. The new Neverwinter is a place where various factions are vying to become the power in the city. Some factions are very overt. Lord Neverember, the current open lord of Waterdeep, has come to the city and declared himself Lord Protector. The Sons of Alagondar are a rebel faction who see him as an outsider and want to return to self-governance. The Uthgardt Barbarians are raiders in the wilderness. Other factions are much more secretive, such as the Harpers, a group of devil-worshipping cultists, the necromancers of Thay, the shadow-powered Netherese, and a certain sovereignty of aberrations who shall remain nameless.

Each faction’s section lays out history, goals, the faction’s relationships to the other factions, potential encounters (and where to find those monsters in other sourcebooks), and major NPCs (including stat blocks). Each section is also liberally sprinkled with sidebars offering suggestions theme tie-ins, potential adventure hooks, and choices the DM might wish to make. For example, Lord Neverember could be purely driven by profit, but he might be someone with a legitimate claim to the throne of Neverwinter, and he might be someone who could learn to put the good of the people first. It’s up to the DM to decide if he’s ultimately a villain, a hero, or a mixture of both. This uncertainty means that, even if a player picks up a copy of the book, they aren’t going to know every secret of the campaign, because every DM’s campaign will be different.

Location, Location, Location

There then follows a lengthy gazetteer section. Naturally enough, this includes a very detailed look at Neverwinter itself, with break-downs of the different districts, and descriptions of important locations, such as the Moonstone Mask, an intrigue-laden inn build on a floating chunk of rock, anchored to the city by heavy chains, Castle Never, which has become a monster-filled dungeon in the middle of the city, the Shard of Night, a floating tower hanging over the city that casts no shadow, and the Beached Leviathan, a tavern run by an ex-pirate out of a building fashioned from his ship. This section also includes a very lengthy chunk about the areas under Neverwinter. We do love our urban dungeons, after all.

It also looks at locations nearby, such as the town of Helm’s Hold, which is acting as a sanctuary for those afflicted with the Spellplague, Neverwinter Wood, where the powers of Thay and Netheril pursue their own dangerous agendas, the lost dwarven city of Gauntlgrym, which is ready to be the Moria of your campaign, Evernight, the Shadowfell version of Neverwinter, and, of course, much much more.

Like the rest of the book, this section has great ideas on adventures, encounters, and ways to tie-in the various character themes. A DM could run a dozen campaigns from this material, let alone a single Heroic tier one.

The Downside

This book is fantastic, but one thing it really doesn’t help with is to think about what happens beyond Heroic tier play. A clever DM can see where certain threads (the Thayans, the Netherese) could lead away from Neverwinter and keep a story going, but there’s not a lot of advice on how to do so. Given that the book’s goal is to present a complete setting for the Heroic tier, I can understand this, but it seems like something of a flaw to me.

I also have one big complaint about this book, or, more specifically, about the setting. I’ve heard it before. At the core of the story is the destruction of Neverwinter, which was ruined when lava flowed through it. The cause of this? Well, the most immediate cause was a fiery primordial imprisoned under the ruins of Gauntlgrym.

Fiery demon-god under a lost dwarven city that’s become over-run with monsters? Yeah. It’s a little *too* Moria for my tastes.

I suspect Gauntlgrym and the even-more painfully named Mount Hotenow (enow is an older English term for enough, so the mountain’s name is literally Hot Enough) are creations of R. A. Salvatore. He may be a best-selling author, but he sure comes up with some memorable but groan-worthy names for things. A sword called Twinkle? Kind of hard to be scared of. A white dragon named Icingdeath? I remember a reviewer saying that he thought that sounded like a diabetic’s worst nightmare.

But I digress.

Do I Recommend This Book?

Now, even with my long history of affection for the city, I’ve never set an adventure there, principally because I prefer making my own home-brewed campaigns to running stories in someone else’s setting. But this book might be the one that makes me change my mind.

Even if I never run a Neverwinter campaign, this book is insanely valuable to me. It’s full of story ideas, monster stat blocks (including lower-level versions of many classic monsters), a new class, new themes, memorable locations (I might very well pluck the Beached Leviathan out of the setting and put it in the game), and even has a few new magic-items.

I would, without a doubt, recommend this book to DMs who want to run a Heroic campaign in a dynamic setting. It could be run as a rollicking series of dungeons, a campaign of urban intrigue, and more. I would also recommend it, in general, as an excellent handbook for how to craft a limited-focus campaign setting. And it certainly has enough material for DMs not planning on running such a game to plumb for ideas and challenges.

Credit Where Credit Is Due

My copy of this book was graciously provided to me by Gator Games of San Mateo, CA. They can be found online at http://www.gatorgames.com. While the book was provided for free, all opinions on it are my own. I very much appreciate Gator Games sponsoring this article. Thanks!

Your Turn

Do you have history with Neverwinter? Have you read a copy of this campaign setting and wildly disagree with me? Are you going to be running a game in the setting soon? Let us all know.

Click to see more about Neverwinter Campaign Setting on Amazon.com.

CONTEST BONUS: If you’ve gotten to the end of this review, you are clearly serious about Neverwinter. Leave a comment below about why you’re excited about Neverwinter and you’ll earn an extra entry into the contest. But shhhh, it’s our little secret, only for folks who read to the bottom of this review!  Contest entries close on 9/2/11 at 11:59 pm EST. A winner will be drawn at random and announced on Monday 9/5/11.

“Have you written an article for this week?” my husband asked.

“Not yet,” I admitted.

“Have you written an article about Dark Dungeons yet?”

I laughed. “No…but I’m not sure I can spin a whole article from that.”

But then I realized I could. Because I’m not going to just talk about the infamous Jack Chick tract he mentioned. I’m going to talk about the controversy that once threatened to…well…I’m not sure there was ever a real chance of killing D&D and RPGs, but I know a lot of kids (my husband included) weren’t allowed to play D&D when they were kids as a result.

To Dungeons Dark!

If you don’t know about Dark Dungeons, start by going here to read the tract. I hate to give Chick’s website any traffic, but it is a hoot to read, so maybe it’s okay.

If you’re a gamer, you might be wondering why you never got to learn real spells when your cleric became 8th level, or got to wear boss robes.

If you’re familiar with Dark Dungeons, you may be like us and occasionally say things like “I can’t come to the phone; I’m fighting the Zombie,” or “I don’t wanna be Elfstar any more! I wanna be Debbie!” But we are sort of cynical about this stuff.

This charming, ridiculously inaccurate look at RPGs comes to us from the fevered imagination of Jack T. Chick, who’s been making and distributing religious comic tracts since 1960. A scary thought. His tracts range from merely inaccurate and laughable to downright horrifying hate literature against Jews, Catholics, Freemasons, Muslims, and more. Dark Dungeons came to us in 1984, adding RPG players to the list of Mr. Chick’s targets.

The reason D&D became a target at all most likely begins with the sad story of James Dallas Egbert III, whom I mentioned in my earlier article about D&D in the media, as his story was the loose basis for the romance novel and later dreadful TV-Movie Mazes & Monsters. He was a smart, gay kid advanced to college when he was 16. He was doing drugs, freaking out from the pressure of school, and playing D&D. When he disappeared following a failed suicide attempt in the steam tunnels under Michigan State University, his parents hired a private eye named William Dear. Dear, trying to spare the parents from a family scandal, failed to mention the homosexuality or the drug abuse, and told them that he was looking instead at D&D as the possible motivation behind Egbert’s problems.

Thanks, Bill. Thanks a heaping load.

Pulling Against All Logic

Perhaps this might’ve been the end of it. But in 1982, Irving Lee “Bink” Pulling, a high school student, killed himself, allegedly hours after a D&D game in which his character was cursed. His mother, Patricia Pulling, unsuccessfully sued both the high school principal that allowed the game to be played and TSR, the original publishes of D&D. After her cases were dismissed, she founded Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons, or BADD.

No, seriously.

Things then take an ever-more bizarre turn as Patricia somehow positions herself as an expert on Satanism and the occult, gets called into law cases as a D&D expert, and generally proceeds to make D&D out to be a gateway to cult behavior.

The trouble is that Mrs. Pulling clearly had no idea what she was talking about. She actually suggested that police should take it as a possible alert if a suspected D&D player’s character has a name that appears in an occult work, such as the Necronomicon. Ignoring, of course, the fact that the Necronomicon itself doesn’t exist, except in fantasy literature.

Now don’t get me wrong. I feel for Mrs. Pulling; I really do. To lose a child must be something that can really break a parent, and the guilt a parent must feel if their child commits suicide must be astronomical. I can understand wanted to shift the blame to something else…anything else. The trouble is, there’s just no evidence at all of D&D being conclusively linked to any crime or suicide. Except in the minds of people who’re desperate to find an answer…any answer…that absolves them of any responsibility.

No Time Like the Present?

Now, that was the 80s. I was there. For some reason, Satanic cults were on everyone’s mind. Probably we were all so freaked out by the feeling of imminent nuclear disaster that we turned to anything to take our minds off of it. I was going to a Christian summer camp in the 80s, and *everything* was about Satanism. Music lyrics were filled with it! There were Satanic references in the names of bands like KISS and Black Sabbath. And, of course, D&D was rife with it. At least, that’s what we were being told.

Except that all the counselors and campers loved playing D&D at night after everything else was done. So kind of a “do as I say, not as I do” thing going on there.

It’s easy to look back and chuckle knowingly at the controversy of the 80s…except that this ridiculous stuff keeps popping back up. After the Columbine High School massacre, everyone took a good hard look at Vampire: the Masquerade. In 2004, Wisconsin’s Waupun prison banned D&D, saying that it promoted gang-related activity. And in February of 2010, an article in one of my hometown newspapers, the Boston Herald, suggested that Dr. Amy Bishop, who shot five colleagues at the University of Alabama, killing three of them, may have been motivated by D&D.

I’m stunned that this nonsense continues in this day and age, but continue it does.

I’m about as avid a D&D player as there has ever been. I did indeed harbor thoughts of suicide when I was a teen. I knew I was gay and desperately didn’t want to be. I was fat, and kids were making fun of me. I was depressed over losing a group of friends, and I felt like things would be so much easier if I weren’t around.

But that didn’t happen. Partly because I met other friends, and, yes, they played D&D. I won’t go so far as to say that D&D saved my life, but I will say it was one factor that kept me entertained through difficult times. If I hadn’t had it, who knows who I’d be today?

Your Turn

Did your folks stop you from playing D&D because of the controversy? Did you ever brush up with any of the craziness in the 80s, or have someone think you were a Satanist because you played Vampire? Let us hear about it!

Now, I pride myself on being able to pull out a new storyline at the last-minute, but sometimes in a situation like this, I’ll say, “Why don’t we resume the game next week? We can play a board game this week, if folks still want to come over.”

This is easy for me to say, as my husband is a raving board game fanatic, and he has an extensive collection. So I thought I’d glance around the game room and tell you about 5 games you may or may not know about that I think are well worth playing.

Wrath of Ashardalaon

I’m a big D&D fan, so I’m sure it’s not shocking that one of my choices is a board game based on D&D. Wrath of Ashardalon is a fun, fast-paced game that simulates taking a party of adventurers down into a dungeon to fight monsters, reclaim treasures, and, ultimately, slay a dragon. It’s a very boiled-down 4th Edition D&D experience. It’s a cooperative game, so everyone is working together, but everyone also has to play the monsters, so it makes for some funny moments. There’s another game with the same rules, Castle Ravenloft, and that’s fun, too, but I prefer the classic Dungeon feel of Wrath to the gothic horror theme of Ravenloft.

Plus, it comes with lots of plastic miniatures of monsters, which you could paint and use in your D&D game! It’s like a double-win!

Read more about Wrath of Ashardalon on Amazon.com.

Pandemic

I have never felt more intense pressure when playing a board game than when I’m playing Pandemic. It’s another cooperative game, in which you play researchers trying to find cures for various illnesses plaguing the globe. Sound boring? It’s not. You have to race around the world while disease is breaking out all around you, working together to find the cures. If the diseases have too many outbreaks…you lose. If you run out of disease markers on the board…you lose. If you run out of cards in the action pile…you lose. Get the idea? The pressure is really on!

This game really does make you feel the pinch of time and terror as things are falling apart all around you. Just when you think everything’s in the bag, something happens, and the whole thing falls apart. The handful of times we’ve won, we’ve really felt the victory!

Read more about Pandemic at Amazon.com.

Betrayal at House on the Hill

This is simply one of the best horror games I’ve ever played, board game, RPG, or LARP. The board is built as the players explore it, using cards to create the sprawling grounds of the mysterious House. The first part of the game is cooperative, until, all of a sudden, the Haunt begins, as dictated by a random roll of the dice. When this happens, one of the players becomes the Traitor, and the game becomes suddenly and shockingly adversarial. There are numerous scenarios that may occur, depending on the exact circumstances that triggered the Haunt. The Traitor might now be controlling plant creatures intent on consuming everyone. Or perhaps the Traitor needs to sacrifice one of the others in the Pentagram Chamber. Or perhaps there are zombies. The game has been different almost every time we’ve played it.

For some reason, we seem to get combinations of cards in the game that work in a creepy fashion. Like when you’re walking in the gardens, and you find there’s a corpse buried under it. Or when you’re in the chapel and you’re confronted by a ghostly bride. It just works out that way but it seems to add to the creep factor of playing the game.

Read more about Betrayal at House on the Hill at Amazon.com.

Thebes

I absolutely love Thebes. You play archaeologists who’ve digging around the world for buried treasures. You build up research, attend lectures, and do other things to garner support, then launch your expedition. Each time you lead an expedition into, say, Egypt, you draw tokens from a bag based on the amount of research you did. Some tokens have fabulous treasures on them, but others have sand. Treasures are worth different points, but sand is worthless and goes back into the bag representing that country. So you end up weighing the risk of finding nothing but sand or finding a valuable treasure that another expedition may have missed!

There’s a small educational portion to the game as well, as a fact card tells you about the treasures, including when they were found, what they represented, and more. But mostly, Thebes is just damned fun.

Read more about Thebes on Amazon.com.

Puerto Rico

On the surface, this game seems like the dullest thing in the world. You play a plantation owner in Puerto Rico, trying to get rich. You build buildings, harvest crops, enter trade agreements, and such. Trying to explain it, however, belies the free-wheeling fun of the game, which is actually surprisingly entertaining. Reversals of fortune make it hard to predict who will gain victory points, and there are a few “screw with the other players” mechanics that make it feel cutthroat and vicious.

Read more about Puerto Rico on Amazon.com.

Your Turn

I know I’ve only mentioned 5 board games here…obviously there are many other fantastic ones. Is there a favorite game you would put forward as one of the best? Share away. I’d love to hear from you.

Let me give a bit of an example of what I mean. You younger gamers who haven’t done your history homework may not realize it, but there was a time when you wouldn’t have been able to play your dwarf paladin…or your half-orc paladin…or an elf fighter above 4th level, for that matter. In the name of game balance, a lot of race-class combinations weren’t strictly speaking legal, and some races were limited to certain levels of advancement in various classes. Your elf may have been 300 years old and taught his martial skills by the finest warriors in the land, but he’d never be better than 4th level as a fighter. With its 3rd edition, D&D started saying yes a lot more to its players. Suddenly, any race could be any class and get to any level of advancement. Yes was in.

D&D 4th edition streamlined saying yes further, making a quick and easy series of DCs and formulae for resolving what could have been a back-and-forth argument in earlier editions. You want to kick a brazier of coals into the ogre’s face? Okay, how about a Dexterity-based attack vs. the ogre’s Reflex defense. I’ll have him grant Combat Advantage if you succeed, because he’ll be startled, and he’ll take 1d6 fire damage. Some 4E players have told me they feel hamstrung by the Powers of the game, but I find them intensely liberating. Strip the flavor text off and repurpose them. Does your fighter want to describe his Cleave as a slash to one foe and a shield-bash to the other? Knock yourself out. Does your wizard want to flavor burning hands as a storm of lightning because of his storm theme? Why not?

Even saying yes in small ways can reap surprising benefits. I recently ran a game for an old high school friend, her son, and a bunch of their friends, young and old. One of the players (one of the adults, oddly) decided she wanted to use a Playmobil figure that was at the table as her miniature. Now, I’d brought about twenty minis with me for people to choose from. I opened my mouth to say that she should really choose one of the to-scale figs. The Playmobil figure was unbalanced, huge, and blocked line of sight. But I didn’t say that. I said yes. What was the consequence? Did the figure get knocked over a lot? Sure. But it was a bunch of kids…they found it hilarious when we referred to the giant cleric, or when I talked about the cleric knocking her head on the cave ceiling. It turned something that my inner control freak could have made an issue of into something we could all laugh at.

Fleshy-Headed Mutant, Are You Friendly?

Just before sitting down to write this article, I ran my first session of the new Gamma World RPG. I have an abiding love of this genre and game. After D&D, Gamma World was the second ever RPG I played, and it looms large in the legend of my childhood. I loved the inherent wackiness of the original edition, with its mutant chickens controlling a food factory, mutant badgers worshipping a college football icon, and flying lion-insect-bats with a fetish for textiles. I’m happy to say that this edition is rife with that level of insanity, and I feel like I’ve come home again.

No intervening edition of the game captured the feel of those insane first games. The tone got more and more serious, and I have a theory about this. The original Gamma World came out when the specter of Nuclear War was looming. I remember being honestly sure, as a teen, that a nuclear war was going to happen. I was so sure of it that I sometimes wondered if it might happen that night, and then I wouldn’t have to worry about my math test the next day. In a climate like that, it felt good to make the Apocalypse wacky. As the Cold War cooled off, it wasn’t necessary to laugh in the face of certain death, so the Apocalypse became dryer and duller. Nowadays, we have threats like global climate change and nuclear-armed terrorists, as well as constant media barrages of people concerned about the Rapture and prophecies of the world ending in 2012 (on my wedding anniversary I might note…maybe gay marriage really is the end of the world!) With so much concern and uncertainty, maybe the time was right for the Apocalypse to get wacky again!

With a game as random as Gamma World is, zaniness is really a part of it right from character creation. Some of our players embraced it immediately. When my friend Jay rolled a Doppelganger Radioactive, he wondered if he might play a lab chimp who’d been exposed directly to the Hadron Collider accident that caused the Big Mistake. I said yes in a heartbeat. Did it matter to me that there was no logical reason for his character to be a simian, or that he didn’t have the Simian origin from the Famine in Fargo expansion? Not at all. He jokingly asked if he could name his character Chimps Ahoy, and I said sure, but how about Chimp Savoy. This caused Jay to immediately envision Chimp Savoy, who would be dressed in a dapper fashion and trying to be civil, but occasionally flying into rages and blasting foes with his radioactive eyes. If I hadn’t said yes, this delightful character might not have been part of my game.

As characters were created, I kept saying yes to my players. The Giant Plant, Mossback George, carries a streetlamp in one hand and wears a stop sign for a shield. Li’l Balls o’ Fire, a Pyrokinetic Rat Swam, (actually an adorable group of mice wearing kilts who fight with needles and blowguns with tiny darts…and who set things on fire gleefully) doesn’t speak. At the player’s request, the swarm turns into shapes and symbols, like the school of fish from “Finding Nemo”. Vi, a Felinoid Plant, is a sentient chia pet. How does that work? I don’t know, but the players love her. And then there’s the Gravity Controlling Mindbreaker, Vw (pronounced Voo) who named himself for the letters on the shield he carries (actually a Volkswagen bug’s hood). I said yes to all of these, and I don’t regret it one bit.

Tilting the Sandbox

Just because I’m saying yes a lot to my players, that doesn’t mean that I’ve totally let go of all control. Oh no, dear readers, no. To illustrate my point, I will give you my framework for my 4E D&D game, Seven Kingdoms: Seowyn’s Crossing, which I’ve charmingly named Sandbox with Benefits. I explained this model in a different article, so I’ll just sum up here. I’m giving my players freedom to roam where they will and pursue whatever goals they take it into their heads to pursue. Because I have a story I want to tell, however, I slip story elements in at a pre-determined pace. If the dragon Flamefang is going to be an important villain later on, then I might decide that there’ll be evidence of the dragon in the 1st adventure, someone talking about the dragon in the 2nd adventure, and a minion of the dragon in the 3rd adventure, no matter which adventures those turn out to be.

Note to my players: I know you read my articles here. I don’t have any plans to introduce a dragon named Flamefang. Ever. This is just an example.

Now, I’ve asked my players to be proactive. I want them to come up with their own goals, and, in general, they are doing that. We’ve barely started, and already there are missing family members to be found, a fey castle that touched one adventurer’s youth, a village to avenge, an orphan in search of his heritage, poachers to be punished, and a character who’s virtually a blank slate with no certain sense of his destiny. I have said yes to all of these backgrounds, and I will use my SWB model to introduce hints of these personal adventures, as well as my own storylines. Then it will be up to my players to decide which stories are most important to pursue, and I will follow, hoping to tell my own stories along with theirs. All in all, it should be one heck of a ride.

Your Turn: Say Yes

I’m advocating any game-master who reads this article to say yes to your players more. I’m not suggesting you should give over the running of the asylum to the inmates. Just try to be more open and accepting of the crazy stuff your players suggest. This doesn’t have to be anything too big. Something as trivial as the Playmobil “miniature” mentioned above could mean more to your player than you recognize.

Happy players keep coming back for more and telling tales of how awesome your games are. As GMs, what more do we need?

How About You?

Do you have a story about a time when you said “yes” to a player and had it result in something you didn’t expect?

…and Beatdown was not pleased to see him.

But like him or not, Beatdown had a lot of questions for his creator:

Where have you been?

I fled Karrnath during the War after several attempts on my life by assassins. I fled to Wroat, where I spent the rest of the War making infusions and laying low. Well, except for the bit of singing. Some call me a bardificer. Har har har.

What are you doing here?

Bards, we’re full of rumors, you know. Heard from someone who heard from someone who heard from someone that you had made your way to Sharn. That you were the bodyguard of Pilar Slowtongue. Guess you’ve moved up since the next rumor I heard was that you were guarding Lady d’Phiarlan and on the way to Korth. Thought I’d kill a few birds with one arrow, not that I can even fire an arrow. See Lady Tyasha perform at the Desmesne of Motion. See if I couldn’t bump into you. And determine whether people are still sore at me over the whole warforged fighting unit business.

Any idea why I deactivated for an unknown amount of time? [part of Beatdown's backstory]

I knew your unit was going to be taken out, if not by the enemies of Karrnath, then by the undead soldiers themselves and the necromancers who made them. I wanted to save you, to prove that you were the new face of Karrnath’s army. I only needed TIME to prove that, and wartime wasn’t the right time. I sent those tho trapped and buried you, along with a small device I fashioned that I could use to wake you up from afar once things had calmed down. I’m sorry, it’s just… there are bigger things for you, Beatdown. Bigger than the Last War. I can’t… shouldn’t say more.

Have you heard from any of my brothers?

Nearly all of them died. Thankfully, there were a few that survived and kept in touch. Unit B4 is my personal bodyguard, but I left him in Wroat to guard my lab. Unit B52 is captaining a fishing boat off the Eldeen Reaches. I believe he calls it the Rock Lobster. Units B13 and B37 work for a company out of Stormreach that serves as protection for research expeditions into Xen’drik.

He won’t speak more while the other passengers in the train are awake. He says he’ll get in touch with Beatdown again once the rest of the train falls asleep.

Jelly and Beatdown walk to the storage car to check on Frank, the kobolds, and Brick. They find them happily munching lemon bars. Brick has just asked Frank about the ritual he knew to rid the sacred grove of skippers (teleporting voles) and Frank has pulled together the leaves where he wrote down the components and such for the ritual he used in Xen’drik. He is sure that he can dig up the necessary components for Brick by the time they pass through Aundair on the way to Lady Tyasha’s appearance in Fairhaven next month. Since the party will be in Fairhaven a couple weeks, there will surely be a free day or two to travel to Brick’s homeland and save his sacred space. Just in case, Jelly copies the ritual down into her ritual book. Frank is well-intentioned, but not necessarily the most reliable person they know.

The train stops in Thaliost, the final stop in Aundair before crossing over the border into Karrnath, and Frank and the kobolds get off. Bleep gives Jelly a picture he drew for her: a crude but adorable picture of a half-elf and a heart. The party wishes Frank and the kobolds well in their journey to their new homeland.

On the way back to Lady Tyasha’s car, the party checks out the various new faces on the train, looking for suspicious characters or unattended bags. Everyone looks on the up-and-up. Even the single guy from the sleeper car is out and about, apparently wining & dining four young women in the dining car. He must be quite the charmer.

In the VIP car, Cyd, Jun, and Ulvein are playing cards and it appears Jun is cleaning up. It’s easy to have a poker face when you’re a changeling. In fact, you could have no face. The party discusses whether Beatdown could ever learn to play poker and the following is decided:

• Beatdown could easily learn the rules of poker.
• He could probably count cards & calculate the likelihood of his hand winning.
• However, he is so lacking in social graces that he’d be a failure at all other aspects of the game.

Cyd goes all in but Jun has a better hand. Cyd storms off, lightning sparks flying from his head. He returns ten minutes later with a glass of wine and a letter, which he hands to Beatdown. It’s from Oros.

“I dared not say this aloud because there are ears everywhere. I will buy the farmer a feast in the dining car to get him of the way for our meeting tonight and cast a Silence ritual over the car so we can speak freely. B13 wrote from Stormreach to tell of a bard he met there. Erushkayan speaks highly of you, though with too loose a tongue. He was telling tales of his adventures to a ladyfriend, and described in some detail a magical book. Nearly had his throat slit by two Emerald Claw assassins, had B13 not stepped in. At any rate, if the book you possess is what I think it is, you could be holding a brighter future for Karrnath – nay! for all of Khorvaire! – in your hands. Eru said it was too bright for you to read. Allow me to help you read it. Bring it with you tonight. To the livestock car, just after midnight.”

The party has been in possession of this strange book for quite some time, and trouble has followed them ever since. If Oros does in fact know what the book is, the mystery could finally be solved. And sure enough, he does. As the party tells him more about the behavior of the book, the energies it had, the missing pages, the dreams that Brinn the wizard had while studying the final pages, and the way the book had changed once it was completed, Oros is practically vibrating with excitement.

He asks for permission to place his holy book on top of the book (which Cyd insists on holding). With a magical book of that type of power, Oros wants to be extra sure that he is right in his guess about what it is… he doesn’t want to anger the powers in the book and knows his gods will tell him if he’s on the right track. The party allows him to place his holy book on top of the mystery book, and as soon as the books touch, a light blue glow pulses out of them.

Oros begins to babble crazily. The book is from a legend of a legend of a legend. He wasn’t sure it actually existed, but it was spoken of in the Prophecy. It’s the directions on how to build a massive eldritch device, something which could destroy all the undead across many, many miles. Oros goes on about how his goal is to overthrow Kaius and return Karrnath to the people with a warforged army with more warforged like Beatdown to protect them.

While Jelly is keen to see fewer undead, she’s a bit wary of this whole government overthrowing, mass-genocide (if you can call it that for undead) idea. Oros admits he’s a little ahead of the game, but these things were spoken of in the Prophecy. Fang wonders whether or not this device will create a second Mournland. Oros gets serious for a minute. He’s not sure. He knows he could put the device together (he is an artificer after all), but more research will have to go into the actual plans, and probably by someone who knows the Prophecy better than he does.

As Oros is leaving the car to head back to his room, the lady-charmer from the dining car busts in, threatening to kill him. An epic battle ensues, which results in no less than eight attempts by the party to throw this baddie off the end of the train car. He kept saving and saving and saving. Then he summoned his lady zombies, which met their gruesome demise on Jelly’s blade barrier. FINALLY, Beatdown was able to shove the necromancer off the train.

“NO TICKET!” Beatdown said.

Everything on the train looked to be fine. Brick decided to take the clothes from one of the dead pirates to the guards up by the engine car to see if they recognized them as any particular band of pirates.  Jelly tags along, stopping quickly in the dining car to ask the staff there to please cut Brick off before he eats lemon pie to the point of illness (like he did with the lemon bars back in Sharn).

The guards say that the train usually gets some sort of pirate attack every few weeks, but there doesn’t seem to be any particular group of pirates doing it. Just marauding thieves. As Brick is leaving, he notices something one of the young kobolds is drawing. The colors are a bit off, but it looks strikingly similar to the teleporting voles that had wreaked havoc on his sacred grove in the mountains of Aundair.

He asks the kobold about it and he refers to the vole as a “skipper.” Their Common isn’t so good to explain it, but Frank is able to explain the story of the skippers and how they did a similar job on an area sacred to the red kobold in Xen’drik. Frank and the kobolds had been able to work together and perform a ritual that drove the kobolds out and created an invisible fence. He’s sure he wrote about it in his book notes, somewhere. Chapter 18? 19? 18? 19? Somewhere. He’ll dig around and let Brick know later.

There are some new people in the dining car, a party of four containing an eladrin, a female dwarf, a tiefling, and a minotaur. They say that they’re on the way to Korth and have plans to sit at that table and get as drunk as possible on the way. Although Beatdown is tempted to kill them (and mentions that he works for “the G.I.A.” – Globe Information Agency – in an attempt to intimidate them into admitting some sort of ulterior motives) he decides to let them live.

Lady Tyasha admits that she’s stir crazy being cooped up in her room and requests to be escorted to the dining car so she can entertain the masses with some drinking songs. (Hey, even opera singers can go commoner once in a while!) The more well-to-do folks in the car recognize her, but most of them just see her as a bard with a pretty voice. Jun serves as a Lady Tyasha decoy back in her bedroom, in case any pirates broke into her car while the rest of the party was with the real Lady Tyasha in the dining car.

After bringing the opera singer back to her car, Brick and Jelly decide to bring a batch of lemon pie desserts to Frank and talk to him more about the ritual that drove off the teleporting voles. Brick is walking through the regular people car (which I’d filled with meeples from Carcassonne) carrying a tray full of desserts when Frank rushes through the door, yelling for help, tears streaming down his face. He barrels straight into Brick, sending delicious sugary lemony treats flying everywhere.

Brick and Jelly follow Frank back into the storage car. Frank is talking a mile a minute but is barely getting the words out in a way that Brick and Jelly can understand. Something about an explosion, how he inhaled it and it tried to take him but he was able to fight it off, but the kobolds, they couldn’t. They’ve changed, something is wrong, but they can be cured. But oh dear, they’re attacking!

Brick climbs up to the roof of the train and runs back to the rest of the party, deftly jumping from car to car.  He alerts Beatdown and Fang, who come running to help. When they return to the car, they see all eight kobolds undergoing some sort of transformation. Their eyes are filling in with inky blackness and their scales are appearing to begin to rot. They attack the party and Frank.

Frank threw himself between the party and the kobolds, begging the party not to kill them. There was clearly something wrong with them, something in the explosion. A spell, a poison, something. They weren’t completely gone yet, maybe they could be cured! Jelly, too, was also reluctant to kill the kobolds. They were so sweet and adorable and it was clear that something was afflicting them and causing them to behave this way.

This worked as a sort of fight & skill challenge combined. While the kobolds were attacking, the party was trying to hold them off while simultaneously disabling them one by one and trying to cure them. Frank’s method of curing took several rounds. He grabbed the kobold in a hug and began to loudly chant some sort of religious text while the evil kobold writhed and hissed. Eventually though, the pleas to the divine worked and the kobold was healed.

Jelly, Brick, and Fang worked to grapple with individual kobolds and tie them up while Beatdown climbed up on the piles of boxes to chase after the older kobolds (one of which was a spell caster). He found the exploded box that started the kobolds’ transformation. He tosses it down to Jelly and Fang, who discover it is was some sort of spell contained in a glass sphere. When the arcane energy reached a certain level, the globe exploded, releasing the spell over the kobolds and Frank.

One of the kobolds up by Beatdown accidentally breaks through a box and falls into some liquid and begins to writhe and smoke. It’s a box adorned with holy symbols and containing a large container of holy water.  Beatdown steps on the kobold’s head, holding it down in the container of water. After a few seconds, there is a burst of light and the kobold’s eyes go back to normal. He even helps pick up the container of holy water and hands it to Beatdown, who chases down the remaining kobolds, grabs them by the throat and pours holy water down their throats.

When the final kobold is cured, Frank begins to cry again. With relief, at least. The party calls for Cyd and gets him to do the Hand of Fate ritual to see where the person who created the spell-bomb was, and it pointed to the southeast, meaning the person was no longer on the train. They’d apparently gotten off on a previous stop, leaving their box behind.

After monitoring the people on the train during the stop at Fairhaven, the PCs return to Lady Tyasha’s car.  Fang hears the sound of a large wooden trunk being scraped along the floor and sees an old man dragging his luggage toward one of the sleeper car rooms next door. He goes to offer his help, and the man looks him over skeptically before agreeing to let Fang help.

Beatdown can’t help but think he recognizes the man and he walks over to the next car to investigate. As he clanks through the door, the man stops for a moment before whirling around to face him.  His eyes widen and he throws open his arms.  ”BEATDOWN!” he exclaims.

It is the artificer who created him, a man Beatdown has not seen since before the Last War.

…but that’s a story for next week….

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