Chris Mortika's page

I admit, a lot of Tim Hitchcock's writing isn't my cup of tea. (That's because I don't like threads of spinal fluid and mostly human eyeballs floating in my tea...)

But I am very pleased to recommend "Hungry are the Dead". It starts plainly enough, with a zombie attack on a village, and just ... keeps ... getting ... weirder. This is the pay-off of a series of four modules, and I found it to be a satisfying conclusion.

Why only 3 stars? Craftsmanship and balance.

There are many points in the adventure where encounters don't work right or the plot derails if the party doesn't succeed in some chancy die rolls or doesn't choose particular actions. The text is long on Lovecraftian adjectives and lurid descriptions, and light on crunch when crunch would be useful. (There are "traps" with no DC and no means to avoid or disable. Other traps trigger even if the party avoids them completely.)

Too, this module completes the "Falcon's Hollow" adventures, at least, for the DM. There's no good way for the player characters to discover how these all tie together.

And, if someone decides whether the forest is Darkmoon Vale (map) or Darkmoon Wood (text), that would be helpful.

This is a tricky module to balance. The pregenerated characters include a paladin and a cleric, and that's good, but neither of them have a Charisma above 12, and that's bad. Parties without clerics will find "Hungry are the Dead" very difficult. Parties with, say, two high-Charisma clerics will find it much easier.

The plug promises "handouts to enhance play". None that I noticed.

I currently have no intention of buying the rest of the 4th Edition books, or playing in a 4th Edition campaign. But there's a lot of experience behind the DMing advice in this book. (For example, Bruce Cordell gives advice on pg 32 about when it's useful to bend some rules when demonstrating or teaching the game.)

Nic Logue strongly recommended this book, and his judgement was spot-on. Reading through this book has made me a better 3.5 Dungeon Master.

If your Curse of the Crimson Throne players are chafing at the Lawful nature of Korvosa, and are wishing they could hang in a looser, more swinging town...

...they should be careful what they wish for.

This is a Player's Guide to Riddleport and the Second Darkness, expanded to 32 pages. The production values are top-notch. Riddleport is a great place to adventure, or run afoul of the thieves. The prestige classes and spells are cool.

The traits, sadly, are incomplete, but the text promises there'll be other traits, in another product, soon.

The sad thing: this will never get used as a Player's Guide. My players loved the $2 book introducing Ptolus. They loved the 16-page guide which introduced the Savage Tide, and the Curse of the Crimson Throne. I plunked down $10 and got five copies, to hand around the table for my players to keep.

This is a $10 item. There's no way I could pay $50 to hand it out to my players. I'd have to make 5 copies of the PDF and hand them out.

So the affordable 16-page player introductions to the campaigns are a thing of the past. Here's hoping that they'll become a thing of the future, too.

Just yesterday, I was discussing Ed Greenwood's old "Pages from the Mages" column in DRAGON magazine. Crusty old Elminster would explain the origins of a couple of spell-books from the Realms, and details the spells in them, with rough edges, aspects of the dwoemers that didn't work quite the way the originator had intended, and such. Even the "standard" spells in the books were sometimes variations (usually slightly deficient) off the standar PHB versions.

I'd been saying that I liked that, and it was one aspect of 3rd Edition I missed, and that (in my opinion) the shininess of 4th Edition had moved further away from: the feel that these spells were part of some imperfect reality, perhaps, in some cases, kludges or "panda's thumbs".

Well, these "Behind the Spells" give us all of that back. I've read six pages on the history and qualities of dispel magic, and it feels more "real" to me. These 38 spells are going to be drawn up into a hardcopy book, and I'm going to loan it to the people who play Wizards in my campaign and say, "Write something like this for a couple more of your known spells."

Wizards should know this kind of trivia about their spells. (Sorcerers, or rogues reading scrolls, not so much.)

Why only 3 stars? Most of this 6 pages is backstory, and it could have been summed up in a page, and the back-story may not fit everybody's campaign.

So, here's the idea: you have a little paper map of Catan tiles, and six dice, with icons for wheat, ore, bricks, wood, sheep, and gold. Two gold icons are one wildcard. (In good light, the gold glitters. In poor lighting, it looks unfortunately like the black ore icon.)

You roll, you re-roll the dice you don't like a couple of times, you use the results to buy stuff. You try to accumulate a high score after 15 turns.

It's a fine solitare game. As a multi-player game, there is no in-game interaction at all: essentially, we passed the dice around the table, taking turns at our independent solitare games.

Here's an example of the level of strategy: For an ore-wheat-sheep, you can buy a "knight", which gives you a single resource you can use later on. In an interesting twist, the first two knights you buy give you ore and wheat, resources you'll need for cities. If you use them quickly, it makes getting cities later in the game harder.

You know the really slow guy, who takes for-ev-er on his turn at Settlers of Catan? This is a fine game to play while you're waiting for him to take his turn.

Did you like Wolfgang Baur's "Adventure Builder" series on the WotC website? Did you like his (short) run of "Dungeoncraft" articles? Consider these kind of like the graduate-level semester.

These essays were written for a specific audience:

• writers interested in freelance design work (for example, essay #2, "Shorter, Faster, Harder, Less" on writing tersely)
  
• GM's willing to spend money, time, and effort to create kick-butt adventures and experiences for their players (for example, Nick Logue's "Stagecraft", on cinematic techniques)
  

(If you're happy running modules as written, there's not a lot here that will interest you.) Wolfgang culled the best of the Open Design essays for this collection.

My recommendation: get the print version. It's well-assembled and a nice size.

...this will one of their easy hits.

Woooh. There's a lot of stinky little encounters in there, as people hilariously note, and there's a lot of bad editing there, as people hilariously note.

But the overall scope of the adventure is worthy of comment, too, in its breath-takingly poor handling. An area is blighted. You need to see the local druids to fix it.

The head druid has an amazingly powerful potion, at hand, tailor-made to take care of the problem. But he won't let you have it until you do a task for him. Apparently, he's like a firefighter who won't extinguish your burning house unless you first do a favor for him.

Everything else in the adventure --including the dopey dryad, dopey wererats, dopey brigands, and dopey river rapids-- is filler, side-quests, and incidental encounters that don't progress the storyline at all.

If you're at all interested in game design, here's an incredible article that'll get your attention: customizable character classes. (Remember that in earlier editions, each class had its own XP chart.) Design your class, and then use the analysis in this article to assign the XP necessary for level advancement. For example, a character with d4 hit dice rises in level faster than a similar character with largr hit dice.

There's other good stuff in this issue as well. DRAGON writers were firing on all cylinders during this year.

80% of this book is going to be worthless to almost everybody. It lists page after page of random NPCS. For example, page 26 lists 45 thieves, in no particular order. You find out their race, gender, alignment, attributes, hit points and equipment. That's it. Page after page.

But.

There's some terrific art by Erol Otis, Jeff Dee, and other early TSR notables.

And then there's the "personalities" section, where you get to meet 19 of the characters that Erol Otis, Ernie Gygax, David and Helen Cook, Rob Kuntz, Harold Johnson, and even Gary Gygax, and others had actually played.

(And you'll find out what alignment Robilar actually was, back in 1979).

...it plays to this game's strengths. Blue Rose is a "True20" (very similar to d20) game that emphasizes all manner of social interactions and intrigue. Combat is still around, but a Blue Rose campaign should be focussed more on non-combat aspects of adventures.

It has an amazing world history/ creation myth. The four Gods of Twilight gave physical bodies to the spirits of the world, as a desperate attempt to save them from the Shadow. Intelligent psychic animals are a PC race.

It's the only game I've seen with a patron god for caria daunen (gay relationships).

If you're more of a fan of Mercedes Lackey or Diane Duane than Robert E. Howard, this game might interest you. It's the kind of thing that people who like this kind of thing, like.

This game has become one of our favorites.

There's some real strategy in the gameplay; there are better choices than just ganging up on the leader. The game can get tense, as your hit points drop and BAC rises.

But then someone steps on Pooky, or makes a cheap remark about Fiona's chainmail, or starts a round of drinking, and hilarity ensues. It's fun, even if you're losing.

Replay value is high. My friends and I've played dozens of games, and it's still fresh.

Why not a "5"? The gambling rules don't work as well as they should. (How well you do depends on what cards you're currently holding, and the gambling cards are dross if your character's doing anything else.) And there are cards which play out differently if you're an orc or a troll. Hmmm; I smell an expansion.

These adventures are all designed for a party of 2nd-4th level characters. You remember 2nd Ed. 3rd-Level mages, right? A couple of spells and maybe nine hit points.

So these adventures reward more character interaction and investigation than outright slaughter.

When converting these to 3.5, you'll need to set DC's for the skill checks. My advice: err on the side of low: there will be a lot of skill checks, and these early-2E modules simply assume that the party will investigate, convince, and track things as they please.