Counsel of Wyrms

Oh my god! They killed FR, you bastards!

2009-11-03T08:02:00.005-08:00

Getting back into D&D with 4th Edition after an extended absence starting about the time that they moved to third edition is deeply amusing: I started way back in the days of AD&D 1e and was always slightly disconcerted by the changes made to the Forgotten Realms setting as part of the transition to 2e. I don't even know what they did to accomodate 3e in the Realms - 3e became too much like GURPs for me, with too much flexibility and overly complex rules. Now, as part of the transition to 4e, they're changing all sorts of things again and a good segment of the fan-boys are up in arms. Again. To the extent that ignoring their rantings bemoaning the changes - as yet only hinted at - on forums is hard work.

Guys, they ruined the realms with all that nonsense about the Time of Troubles, ok? That was fifteen years ago. Get over it.

Anyway, I'm going to do what I always do with settings: keep what I like and ignore the bits I don't.

Apple Mac Tools for DMs

2009-11-03T08:02:00.003-08:00

A quick brain dump of the tools I'm currently using to manage a 4e D&D campaign I'm starting in the Forgotten Realms on my Macs:

Bento: it's a pretty neat way to store information about NPCs, locations, maps and so on - cook up a custom format and load the information in.

PDF versions of the books: they fit in your laptop, they're searchable and you can cut-and-paste from them into your own documents (for personal use only, obviously).

Devonthink PRO to organise the PDFs and other documents in a useful way. I'm not sure I'd buy this just for D&D, but since I own it already for other things, it's a great way of organising them.

Pages: to prepare player hand-outs.

Something I don't have is a suitable mapping tool. I might have to sucumb to Campaign Cartographer on the PC, I don't know.

D&D Mapping tools for the Mac

2009-11-03T08:02:00.001-08:00

It turns out that OmniGraffle is a sufficient tool for doing maps on the Mac.

You can do it the easy way, scanning or otherwise acquiring an image of the underlying map - like I did here:

where I took the map from the Cormyr article from Dragon, cut the appropriate area out, converted it to B&W and added it as a background to OmniGraffle. Make it transparent so that a grid shows and draw my additions on top.

The other way to do it is to actually draw the terrain from scratch, which is possible and probably not much harder than any other tool. Certainly good enough for the sort of topographical maps I want to do, and I'm sure you could do pretty fancy stuff if you actually had graphic talent.

Thoughts on 4e Spelljammer

2009-04-30T05:46:00.001-07:00

I've always liked the underlying ideas behind Spelljammer, the 2e AD&D campaign extension or setting that featured wooden ships in space.
I realise that the idea of crystal spheres floating within the phlogiston, each containing some sort of solar system, stretched the credulity of many people but I fell it fits nicely into the sort of high-fantasy campaign I like to run.
I will admit that there was rather too much goofy stuff - giant space hamster, gnomes and the spin put on the Giff - but we simply ignored most of that.

Naturally, since I'm getting back into D&D with 4e - I was one of those that faded away at the time of 3e, partly because that's where life took me and partly because 3e never made any sense to me at all - I want to bring back wooden spaceships in my campaign world, which is closely based on the Forgotten Realms.

To that end, I've been flicking through the 2e Spelljammer books, recently prised out of a treasure chest in my attic, to work out what needs to be carried across into 4e to make spelljamming work.

The 4e Manual of the Planes already features a flying ship called a Spelljammer (which seems to be a typical primitive groundling vessel converted by installing a helm - it's clumsy and slow) and
Adventurers Vault includes very simple rules for vehicles, giving all vehicles MR D - at least 2e had a more nuanced idea, with different manoeuvrability for both flying creatures and vehicles (or was that 1e?) and with no allowance for vehicles that might be designed to ram others.

It seems to me that, at a minimum, we need rules for spelljamming helms, better rules for ship-to-ship combat and maybe some flavourful feats and powers for those who want to run a wildspace based campaign - Serenity/FR mash-up, anyone?