Happy Holidays!

Om nom nom - Beholder Pie!

My friend cooked this pie for one of our epic weekenders: two days of solid roleplaying to mark the culmination of a campaign arc. Tonight, as the Christmas turkey digests and we reach for that extra glass of port, let's remember the reason most of us play: to catch up with friends, break bread together, and have fun. Usually it's not the adventure that matters most, it's all the great times that go with it. I wish you all a happy holiday, and ask you to join me in a toast to 2013 - may it bring good gaming to us all!

G is for Grell

Grells are levitating horrors whose dangling tentacles secrete a paralyzing poison. They like to lurk high up in caves, dropping silently on their prey and hoisting them up to the ceiling, where they rip them to pieces with their sharp beaks. As a species they live together in weird "hives", communicating in a semi-telepathic language of chirps, squawks, and thrashing tentacle gestures. Each hive is run by a Patriarch, whose orders are passed on to the common workers by a caste of Philosopher Grells.

Strange that Grells feel the need to philosophize, given that all they do is eat people. Maybe they're looking for meaning. Judging by the picture above, they certainly seem to enjoy eating people - in fact, they find it pretty bloody humorous. That's okay. We find them humorous too, with their silly brain heads and daft beaks.

The internet tells me that Grells were invented by Ian Livingstone, which is pretty cool. As a kid I was fanatical about his Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, and even wrote letters begging for this-or-that to be included in future titles (probably Vampires! or More Wizards!). I actually met him later on in life, and had one of those silly moments where I just shook his hand and smiled instead of saying how much his books meant to me. Anyway, I'm far from alone in my fandom - in fact, Jonathan Green's got a kickstarter going on right now to create a commemorative book for their 30th anniversary. If you have any interest in gamebooks - even the history of D&D - I'd suggest you head over there and pledge!

Dungeon 209: Tears of the Crocodile God

A sacrifice to Bansouk's vicious Crocodile God finally meets her maker...

Just a quick post to let you know that my first adventure is soon to be published in Dungeon magazine. Back in March I pitched Tears of the Crocodile God through the DDI submissions channel. I heard back from them shortly after moving to Guildford, and spent much of June writing and play-testing. It's been a personal goal of mine to have an adventure published in Dungeon, so it's fair to say I'm over the moon! If you're a subscriber, I hope you'll enjoy it, and maybe find some use for it in your own games.

Best of all, this isn't the only adventure I've got coming - after submitting the final draft, the folks at Wizards have been in touch with more work, and I now have more projects in the pipeline. Though Beholder Pie will be baking at a lower temperature until I'm done, I'll try and post updates when I can. The good thing about adventure design is that it keeps you thinking about the game, so there's lots I'd like to share. Until then, I hope you'll join me in raising a tankard to the Crocodile God - may he forever wallow in the blood of fallen adventurers!

F is for Firenewt

Firenewts were a race of bipedal, lizard-like marauders that lived in deserts and arid mountains. Their raiding parties would strike out from volcanic lairs in search of tasty human captives, which they'd take back as food for their larders. As a species they were barbaric, tribal and thoroughly evil. Somehow, I don't think Stacey's illustration fully captures this.

I use the past tense because firenewts eventually went the way of the dodo, as far as the game goes. I guess D&D can only support so many  lizardmen (or "lizardfolk" as we're inclined to say now, to avoid discriminating against lizardgirls). Most likely they were usurped by Salamanders, which in reality are newts, and were once thought to have an affinity for fire. So they're the same thing really. In terms of lore, I suppose I prefer the elemental Salamanders (though I think they need the word "man" added to the end of their name).

As she was drawing them, Stacey decided that Firenewts like to dance, which is what this one is teaching his boy. So I suppose that adds something new to their lore!

Don't Panic!

Craig J. Spearing's cover to Kobold Quarterly 22

Things have been a little quiet around here recently, but normal service shall be resuming soon. I've just started a funky new job, and right now we're in the process of moving across country to our new house. Expect a more regular posting schedule once we're fully back online.

That's not to say things haven't been busy in the kitchen though! First off, we had an article published in the Summer issue of Kobold Quarterly. "The Scaled Steamhall" is a mystical bath-house that caters to the cream of Midgard's Mharoti Imperials, even serving as a hatchery for the Sultana's dragon cavalry. Beyond flavour and adventure hooks, the article also provides some crunchy 4E content in the form of magical "wyrmspa treatments", stats for dragon mounts (which may have inspired the issue's wonderful cover), and some old-school dungeon maps by Stacey. With interest in 4E apparently flagging in some quarters, I'm quite proud we've kept the fires burning here.       

Labyrinth Lord: a tome of old school goodness.

I also won a prize for my entry into the one-page dungeon competition, which won the "Best Eye Beams" category (surely the best category of all!). The Tomb of Snowbite Pass also got special mention by the guy who runs the competition, who praised it for its classic old-school feel. Somewhat appropriately, it won me a copy of the Labyrinth Lord RPG, which I'll be sure to give a whirl as soon as we have some free time! I've promised to draw more one-page dungeons when I get the chance, so expect some additions over the next few months.

Beyond this and the move, there's been one other exciting iron in the fire that I'll (hopefully) be able to tell you about soon. Until then, take care, and stay tuned! 

Small but Vicious Dog

"Ruff!"

I don't know about you, but animals don't seem to last very long in my games. Often it seems that the moment somebody gives them a name, it's just a matter of time before they croak.

Take Bagsy, the loyal mule eaten by goblins after being left alone outside the Keep on the Shadowfell. Or Stumpy, the trihorn behemoth burned alive in a reckless fire started by our warlord (Stumpy actually survived with extreme burns, which made it kind of worse). Or the "small but vicious dog" listed under the Rat Catcher's starting gear in Warhammer: I've probably seen more of those kick the bucket than actual rats! Over the years I've lost count of how many riding horses have been crushed by avalanches, ridden off cliffs, or just caught on the wrong side of a fireball - and don't get me started on familiars.

Of course, I'm to blame most of the time. Killing a pet is probably just a cheap way to crank up the pressure, so I end up treating them like red shirts, or those rookie cops who're just about to get married. Perhaps I'm just haunted by a scene from My First Ever Adventure (I was nine!), when my brother's character asked a local woodsman if he'd seen his horse, and the DM told him the guy was wearing suspicious-looking horse-ear slippers - a stroke of genius that I've possibly been trying to emulate ever since.

Still, sometimes it's just down to the nature of the game: D&D has lots of explosions, and animals are usually pretty frail. Which is great if you just lurve killing animals, but sucks if you want to play a classic "man and his dog" concept. Thankfully 4th Edition is quite good at abstraction, so it's easy enough to come up with a set of rules where they simply can't be hurt. So long as your loyal companion isn't a fighting dog, I think it's fair to give them a handful of flavourful utility powers, yet keep them pretty much off-map during combat (incidentally, this sort of thing is one of the reasons some people hate 4th Edition - but let's not go there thankyouverymuch).

Check out the rules below. It's a matter of taste whether or not you demand a feat to get these powers, or just hand them out willy-nilly. I'd be inclined to go for the latter, so long as the player invests some time bringing the animal to life at the table.

May of the Dead: Lords of the Grave

"That's not a knife... That's a knife"

And so May draws to a close. Here in the UK we've had some beautiful weather, with well over a week of glorious sunshine (an oddity for Britain). The birds are singing, the flowers are in bloom, and the house I'm staying in has its own swimming pool (if a week of sunshine is an oddity, this is a temporal paradox). None of which is particularly appropriate for the gruesome May of the Dead blog carnival. Thank goodness for lone maniacs, eh?

I don't know if you've been following the blog carnival, but there've been some fantastic contributions. Here are a handful of my favourites:

Roving Band of Misfits brought us Horde Zombies. The twist here is giving zombie minions a resurrection power somewhat akin to a troll's, bringing them shambling back to life on their next turn. I'm not so keen on the encounter power (I throw minions around like confetti, so it's a pain to track anything on them), but I love the overall vibe here.

That Robed Guy gave us the Z-Virus, a brutal zombie contagion. I picked this one out not so much for the rules (though they're perfectly serviceable), but mainly because - as That Robed Guy says - your standard zombie doesn't have an infected bite in 4E (or in any other edition, as far as I know). Which is odd when you consider how common it is in the movies.

Fantasy Paper Miniature Models created some papercraft monsters that immediately brought a big smile to my face. Similarly creative was the wonderful Sarcophagus created by Terrain Wench. I'm big on props, so I really enjoyed checking out the construction process here. 

DMG 42 gave us a complete board game with the Siege of Barovia. I initially got a hint of Zombies!!! from the rules, but the more I thought about them, the tighter they became. I'd like to play this someday.

Going Last unleashed the catoblepas onto 4E, giving them a trait that forces all living creatures in sight to make death saves at the end of every turn. One of the main characters in my old 3E campaign died to a catoblepas, so the monster's always held a place close to my heart. Never known how to pronounce its name though. Cat-o-BLEP-as? Cat-OH-blepas? I usually go with Cat-OB-le-pas. 

D&D Weekly worked up a couple (!) of adventures for the carnival, the second of which had a ghost pirate theme. Brilliantly this included a ghost parrot that mimics the voices of its enemies during battle, drawing their allies out of formation. Who's a pretty boy then? 

For myself, I submitted the Death Knight as a racial variant to the Revenant. Over the past few weeks I've invented some new powers to accompany this, primarily triggered by Tjaart trying to take "Wild Talent Master" for his death knight ("three free powers!!" - hardly the first time a player has tried this). When Stacey drew the wonderful picture you see above, I decided to write it up into a new article. See what you think!