Jeremy Mac Donald's page

i really hope that there is a treasure generator. something that will print out the magic item cards, and help fill in the treasure stuff.

The final trick I use is to put a small sticker on the base of each mini with number on it. That way if I have 5 orcs in a fight they are all numbered and the sheet with their hit points has a number that matches with each mini. This way I never get mixed up about which hit points go with which monster. This goes a long way to help keep combat running smooth and keep my brain free to focus on tactics and narration.

Your real question isn't 'can I create a painter' but in fact 'can I create ANY style of character I want like the expert' and to that I'd say yes, Skills choices for example, could you create a fighter who is trained in HISTORY..if your character concept made sense (son of the kings historian etc) then why not swap one of your trained skill options with HISTORY...will this destroy the game...personally I can't see why and it fits your characters concept. Likewise with a Fighter trained in NATURE because he was brought up as a hunter\skinner but isn't a real wilderness warrior like a ranger.
Any of the class's can be adjusted just need to ensure that the changes won't step on the toes of other characters too much and they work within the mechanics.

Hmm, well everything upthread seems to very seriously ring in on the 'positive' side of things and all are Very Good Things to my perception.

My next question, in addition to the OP, is:

How much extra fluff material is actually REQUIRED fluff material? In other words, do I Absolutely Must Have Need the DMG2 and the PHB2? Do I need each individual classes power cards to play them?

This was another big concern that I would very much like to get people's opinions on, as any major book purchase must be careful run through the ROI filter.

Thanks in advance!

That said all of this crunch is essentially available with a DDI subscription - If you get one of those and the core books you can probably get by.

Finally if you were going to go pure 'core only' 4E and not use DDI then I'd say 4E core is PHB, DMG, MM, and probably Adventurers Vault and PHB2. You could start with just the core three but you'll find the last two bring a lot too the game.

Finally you might see if you can join a group to try it out, or borrow the books if you can - I'd hate for a gamer to make a big purchase and then be unhappy with it if money is a major concern.

Its paradoxical but one of things I like most is that WotC has spent so much effort making combat work really effectively in terms of balancing characters and making it newbie friendly etc. etc. etc. is that I spend a lot less of my personal game prep time worrying about combat. WotC has done this for me and because of that I spend my time doing more of the sorts of things I did in 2nd edition like focusing on fluff and stories. Or were I am focusing on combat its in ways to make the encounter about the encounters environment and how that will present the players with interesting challenges.

So in converting Age of Worms, when I'm not thinking about Skill Challenges then I'm taking the description of the broken down farmstead and trying to turn that into something more then 'here there be two Owlbears' and instead thinking about what happens to the falling apart house if there is a huge fight in the middle of it. Age of Worms does not address that but, since my prep of owlbears only takes 15 minutes, I spend the next hour coming up with how the house will start to collapse on the players during the fight and what happens if the owlbears start tossing players through the weak walls.

In 3.5, at least by the mid to late levels, I had no time for this as I was scouring monster feat lists to rebuild the monsters so that they could challenge the players. It was all I could manage to do that and still have an adventure for game night.

Hmm...

I keep answering this question and then realizing that my answers can be subsumed under larger headings.

* Play Balance is very strong and remains a constant even as new splat books pour out and across levels. What this means:

- your splat books are not making your older monster books to weak to use (caveat monster design has improved so there are some aspects of this but its more that some monsters play better now (are more fun - don't cause combats to drag) then that they are unbalanced).

- DM Prep time is much less about trying to create balanced encounters, in 3.5 if there were many splat books in play the DM had to spend lots of prep time getting the monsters onto something like an even playing field and thats no longer the case. In this regards it feels a lot more like prep time for older editions.

- Play balance means that you don't have to worry to much about some players just being cooler then others.

- Characters are comparable at all levels, you don't get a situation where a character that was really good at low levels is no longer really contributing very much to the parties succsess.

- There is no need to 'design' your build. A character is good at what it does more or less from the get go. You don't really have a situation where the character is finally realized if specific feats are carefully taken at specific levels. This feature meets particularly mixed reviews from players - for some people one of the most fun aspects of the game is carefully designing ones character and picking out every attribute the character will take 12 levels in advance so that when the character finally gets to 12th level it will be unbelievably awesome. In 4E what you get for doing that is minor at best (see play balance above) and your probably better off simply taking whatever makes the most sense when you actually get the level. If your a big role player you like this feature because characters grow organically (your choices are a response to the events that have befallen the character and not determined by the build the player designed in advance) on the other hand organically growing characters are not something you even bother with thinking about except at game time - no sitting at home tweaking builds for fun (well you can do it but you don't really get much compared to the players that don't - see also newbie friendly below).

* Philosophically the game has moved towards both Gamism and Narrativism and away from Simulationism. While these are all always points on a kind of continuum this is the direction 4E has headed. What this means:

- There has been an attempt to deconstruct what players like in playing their characters and to give that to them. Awesome moves are often considered a very fun part of combat by players and the entire system has essentially been redesigned to give players choices involving awesome moves. This is actually somewhat disguised initially because the players are comparing the fact that their 3.5 chain tripping fighter was really way more awesome cause he had a combo that allowed him to kill 4 storm giants in a single round at 9th level and he can't do that know (see play balance above) but once you get past the fact that 4E characters are just weaker then their 3.5 counterparts you can begin to see that really combat is made out of awesome moves but here there is variety instead of a focus on doing only 1 thing (like tripping) but doing it phenomenally well.

- This also means that characters are inherently designed from the ground up to operate in the major types of play in D&D. Most campaigns involve combat, non-combat skill based challenges and pure roleplaying/character development. The 4E design means that all classes are roughly equally good in all types of play instead of splitting things so that some classes are meant to be great out of combat but not so good in combat or vice versa the current design means that characters operate in both environments roughly comparably, giving the story a chance to unfold more naturally because you don't have to try and provide both in every session to keep your different players happy.

- The system returns to the philosophical split between rules for DMs and rules for players that existed pre 3rd edition. The DMs necromancer is able to raise armies of undead simply because the DM says that this is so. Essentially the rules recognize that mechanical restrictions only apply to players and they really exist for play balance purposes. Give the players Wish and suddenly you need to include all sorts of restrictions on its use so the players don't break the game. Give the DMs NPC wish and restrictions are completely unnecessary because the NPC always uses the wish to further the story.

- Following from above the game has been streamlined so that the DM does not deal with irrelevant (essentially story based) mechanics during prep. NPCs can do whatever the DM needs them to do to further the story. The Dwarven blacksmith that so great that he can actually repair the damaged artifact is not a level X anything unless thats required for the story - he is just the greatest Dwarven Blacksmith of his time - since his abilities are fundamentally story based the DM simply does not need to worry about anything except his role in the story.

- between increased gamism/narritavism and better play balance the DMs prep time has either dropped or reverted to being spent on things like player hand outs or working on the campaigns fluff or the story of the adventure.

* The Characters are newbie friendly. What this means:

- Its easy to make a character and be off to play time quickly. That character will be well balanced against even the veteran players. The abilities of the character do not take very long to grasp - you won't need to spend as much effort understanding the rules to run the character and choices will generally be good - you don't need some one else who is an expert to choose all your abilities in order to have a good character that contributes. That said the rest of the game is not so simple - tactical combat remains more or less as murky as ever and newbies are likely to become bewildered by all the conditions flying about as well as not grasp opportunity attacks or flanking (combat advantage).

trellian wrote:

I prefer Paizo's style, which is a lot more appealing for those of us (and I know I'm not alone), who also likes to simply read adventures, not play them. I have two Adventure Paths I have no intention of playing, but I did enjoy reading them. I can see that we are in the minority though, and understand that Wizards don't want to cater to them.

In some ways, Paizo's adventure path books have functionally become a better produced version of Dungeon Magazine, without any ads and better printing. Since I don't have a DDI subscription, the Paizo APs have functionally replaced for me what use to be Dungeon Magazine. I don't think I'll ever run most of the APs as written. I'll take a few encounters here and there, along with some storylines for my ongoing 4E game.

If I'll give 4th ed a try (which I am seriously considering), I am actually thinking of buying a really cheap and/or second-hand PC (I also just use Mac) just so that I can use the various Builder appllications. Which others are there, again? Encounter builder? Monster builder? Plus various reference materials?

Add up power cards for all classes, it might be an expensive game to run. Better be fun, then!

If you haven't checked it out yet, Combat Advantages #14 free-zine is now out and it's got alot of great content in it. I just completed a review of it on my 4e blogsite -

Friday's 4e Freebie - Combat Advantages #14: "Savages"

One of my players a big hook now other than doing what Allustan says, instead of getting clues over time. I dont want to drop the info on Dragotha or Kyuss yet, so I guess I need a false hook. I am willing to alter the story.

Any ideas?

From my own experiences with conversion, I think they work just fine ... This however, has nothing really to do with the system itself and is more an issue of personal taste and vision.

Scott has his preferences in what he wants to be doing during game night and those may not line up perfectly with yours. Use the opportunity to make some changes to get things the way you'd like them.

Character Builder really won me over from a very skeptical position myself. I love books (I own a bookstore) but this program is just too well done to ignore. Once you use it you can't figure out how you ever survived without it.

Steve Geddes wrote:

I have read many posts indicating that the consensus is that WoTC 4th edition adventures are pretty poor and I was wondering why people hold that view? I've recently started running my first 4th edition game and having read through a bunch of modules with pretty low expectations, found myself pleasantly surprised.

What is it about them that makes them be regarded as poor? Or do I have it wrong - it's purely a matter of the kinds of stories people like?

No such thing as a poor, purchased adventure. There is only a poorly run adventure!

As ever,
ACE

trellian wrote:

James Martin wrote:

Not that I'm saying Paizo modules work perfectly for this in 4e either. They don't and although I see Scott Bett's admirable attempt to convert the Paizo APs, they don't ring quite right to me either.

Could someone expand on that comment? I'm really dying to play a 4th edition campaign, but don't want to play WoTC's modules, at least not as written.. What I really want to do, is try to convert some of Paizo's adventures. Why doesn't the conversions feel right?

Paizo's Adventure Paths are rooted in 3.x. They're built off that platform, embrace what works for that platform and fit the tone of that platform, a sense of anything goes. A sense that heroes are everyday people who rise above their peers to become something legendary.

4e's feel is that heroes are different, from the very get go. They don't use the same rules as non-heroes, they don't have the same feel. They're born special and time and experience allow them to refine that specialness. Converting one from one system to the other forces me to make different choices than the original designer made. I bought that module for the choices that the designer made, because I liek those choices and believe in them. Converting them from 3e, a rich and varied system with years of development, options and flavor to 4e, a young system that hasn't developed the same richness of options means substituting monsters, changing tones and making choices that are less than optimal. The giant crab in Burnt Offerings doesn't have an equivalent. So Scott chose to use Kruthiks, I believe. Its a valid choice, but in my mind, having run that adventure in 3.5 and seeing the looks on the faces of my players when a giant frickin' crab popped out of that helmet: priceless. Kruthiks don't have the same pop for me. Reading through the further conversions, too many encounters that we memorable and vivid seem less so to me with the conversion.

The biggest difference I suspect you'll actually find between Paizo's version and Scott's will be that in 3.x you usually faced off against a a singular big bad while in 4E you tend to fight groups. I seriously doubt that you'll find that fighting groups is actually a worse combat in most cases - the change ultimately stems from the fact that if the PCs can nerf your big bad the combats over in a very anti-climatic way. Beyond this 4E directly addressed some of the issues with the singular big bad in their monster design.

Beyond that 'the characters are hero's.' is definitely something finds in Paizo adventures - its possible to make 3.5 not have this as an underlying theme but that is not what Paizo has done with their APs (at least not up to Legacy of Fire which is as far as I have gotten). In each case the PCs will quickly attain hero status and if they did not have it initially its very ambiguous in 3.5 as to why the characters are not hero's. A first level fighter - especially one with access to many splat books, is far more potent then a commoner and in fact even better then a warrior and the early game differences are far more pronounced. 4E characters grow much more slowly then 3.x ones so they stay 'within reach' of normal humans for longer.

Finally is a Crab cooler then a Kruthics? Yeah I'd agree but this is a singular case. Conversions have a chance to take another look as an adventure in which the authors and editors where generally working against a brutal deadline and not every encounter was the most inspired it could be - in my experience for every instance where the converter made a choice that might not have been as cool as in the original there is another point where the choice is absolutely inspired and will in fact enhance the work. Beyond that its not always obvious what will strike ones players as more exciting - that Kruthic nest under the helmet has about as much chance of turning out to be a truly exciting and memorable encounter for ones players as the Crab does - My Cleric's fought Kruthic's in 4E and they are a pretty fun encounter - the nest members operate with an interesting synergy. In other words I could easily see the 'reveal' of the crab being more awesome but the actual combat over the next 45 minutes being more fun against Kruthic's then against the crab.

I use the Tact-Tiles jigsaw-style dry-erase boards, which sadly aren't available any more (though the new Battle Boards are pretty much the same thing).

There is a thread around here were the DM and the PCs actually made up a song/poem for Zotzilaha. I actually wish I could find the thread because it was just that funny.

Yeah, I am incredibly pleased with these updates. Many major balance issues fixed, both overpowered and underpowered elements. And they've clearly been working on this for a while, and from what they've said, it sounds like we might see similar errata every month.

It would always been ideal, of course, if everything was perfect from the start. But that's an impossible task, and I'm more than happy to see them simply being willing to fix things once the flaws are revealed.

I want to spend my prep time thinking up ways to enhance the encounters or adding back story to the villains - not rechoosing feats and spells for the monsters in order to make them halfway competitive with the players.

I also really appreciate that they give us some idea on why something is receiving erratta. It makes it much easier to swallow if you understand where the designers are coming from.

Anyone know where to get some good reviews for 4th ed adventures? I keep wanting to give 4th ed another shot, but with my other games, I don't have time to write my own or convert.

Edit: By good, I mean well written and unbiased, not necessarily positive.

Ah, fair enough! I had not had much experience with 3rd edition adventures, just knew that the designers had offered this sort of philosophy as explanation for their current offerings of adventures.

I definitely agree that, even with that philosophy, there is room for more improvement in the adventures themselves. I like the concept and think the format is fine, they just need to include more info in the right places, and more guidance on how PCs can step outside the assumed path. Which still would not provide the sort of intricate and detailed stories that some are looking for, but I think would let them hold true to their philosophy without having quite as much disappointment in their adventures.

Though, as I mentioned, I've heard better things about their offerings of late, so some of this may well have already been addressed.

I recall reading that Barbara Young (an early Editor of Dungeon) used to get very unhappy whenever an in house professional at TSR wanted to write an adventure for Dungeon as she new that there was little chance it would be able to stand up to the rest of the material she was printing simply because she was telling 99% of the people submitting their great idea that it was not good enough and just taking the very best one. Even in house professionals could not compete with that model.

This continued write through the 3rd edition era with most of the adventures appearing had gone through that 1 in a 100 process. Only the APs were done differently and that sometimes showed, though the amount of time and effort spent on the APs helped keep quality high and the writers chosen had mostly already proven themselves by being chosen multiple times from the 1 in a 100 pool. i.e. if you had the talent to be the best adventure out of 100 peoples submissions on multiple occasions then you obviously had talent in adventure writing.

The purpose of making the adventures as vague as possible is because it is up to the DM to provide the connections to his setting, story, and characters, both PC and NPC. WoTC adventures make it very easy to dissect and disseminate all or part of any given published adventure, change a few things to fit YOUR campaign, and play with a fairly minimal amount of preparation.

The compelling NPC that is neck deep in deep dark cultist activity but is involved, in reality, because he feels it is the only way to protect his daughter works in nearly any adventure that feature a cult with only some minor skinning.

If they decide to tell us a really compelling story set in their default world that will be well received and gain significant following. We saw this with 3rd where Red Hand of Doom, with its interesting back story and strong, active, plot was considered some of the absolute best work that WotC put out. Its no accident that they use that setting for their first AP.

Is there a reason that a third party publisher couldn't write a 4e adventure that wasn't in the delve format? The format of the adventures seems to be a sticking point for some.

Scott Betts wrote:

Werthead wrote:

I know that at one point WotC said that they estimated that 20 million people had played D&D in its lifepsan, but if that's 20 million since the mid-1970s that's still rather a vague amount. And it's hard to tell if there's a substantially larger market now than there was then.

Recent court filings mentioned that WotC holds the number of current players of D&D at around 6 million. I'd say the tabletop RPG market probably stretches 1 or 2 million beyond that, accounting for those who player other RPGs but don't play D&D.

I'd say more than that. A lot of people play WoD and I imagine they're picking up more players now with the vampire craze that's going on at the moment. WoD by itself surely has to be at the 1 million + market, and that's not even counting everyone else (including Paizo)?

I think that philosophical shift is what has caused the poor reaction to the adventures by many. And I understand it has gotten better, as P1 - E3 have progressively seen more story, more interwoven plot, etc, and the Scales of War AP has similarly evolved after the early adventures. So it could also just be their early works involved them still feeling out the right style for the edition.

I think that the issue is that most folk 'round these parts expect their adventure stories to come from people and plots and to be driven by these NPCs. Most WotC stories are contained within some large structure which serves as 'adventure place'. This setup really results in their being little character driven story to the adventure. The PCs are going to go to this place and at the bottom of it there will be a BBEG.

Furthermore WotCs delve design has reinforced the static nature of most of these environments. Outside of depopulating them the PCs don't really have an effect because the encounters themselves are frozen in space and time until the PCs 'trigger' them.

That is not to say I don't like some of the things WotC has done with their adventures. Their focus on the encounters themselves - while leaving much to be desired from a story angle, have been some of the most spectacular encounters I've ever participated in. I really like the amount of time and effort that they spend in making important combats truly interesting and complex affairs involving lots of interesting things going on and engaging the PCs in making difficult and compelling choices in terms of dealing with the encounters.

This has caused me to modify how I run even my conversions of Paizo APs (Age of Worms in my case). I find myself picking out three or four of the most important encounters in the adventure and really rethinking them in order to get the kind of compelling encounters we have seen in some of the WotC adventures so there are ways that WotC has improved the game as a whole with their adventures - its just that they, initially at least, took one step forward with excellent encounter design and coupled that with two steps back in terms of having 'flat' NPC villains with an uninspiring story driving the action.

Truth is there is no particular reason one can't have both but its not been the norm - so far at least.

I like the idea but not the technical explanation. The concept that the goblins are working a huge magic spell to keep it all together feels to me somehow more 'unrealistic' then just having them constantly adding parts and it still somehow mostly holding together nonetheless.

Oh and I'm told that using stuff like Paizo's flip maps for encounters where these work is a great plan - the problem is that using flip maps can grow old since your always using the same actual map. Keeping these to just the occasional encounter means they don't feel as old but its also harder to justify the cost.

Hello all

I am wondering what options DMs have chosen when it comes to drawing the maps out of the PDFs for encounters. Right now in other DnD we use a hex board and dry eraser markers. It gets annoying having to draw out every map and I was wondering if anyone had a better method?

Thanks for any info

Jason

Still in the end most of the time, presuming limited resources and limited time you really don't have much choice but to stick to the erasable battlemaps. Personally I go this route for most encounters but go that extra mile for the key encounters in an adventure and make Battle Maps which I print out at my local Kinko's.

personally i would like your suggestions on tips to help newbies play dnd 3.5. please post your advice.

1. Armor class will only save you until level 3 or so, after about level 4, monster accuracy really starts to take several huge leaps making your plate clad dwarf tremble in his socks.

A player that does this will be able to handle the creatures in most adventure modules extremely well - in fact the DM will likely counter by reworking all the monsters in the adventure module to increase their accuracy just because that is the only way to keep up with the players ballooning AC.

As a thought exercise consider that for the same price a +4 weapon (32,000 gp)

you could get Ring of Protection +2, Amulet of Natural Armour +2, Armour +3, Shield +2.

So we are comparing +4 to hit with +9 to AC.

Furthermore you did not even spend 3000 gp out of you 32,000 allotment so your not to far off getting your Ioun Stone. The next 5 grand after that can make the Shield +3 and then its probably time to buy those Gauntlets of Dexterity for 8 grand as the next cheap upgrade - certainly there are a lot of cheap options to boost AC at this point compared to the 18,000 you need to boost your weapon to +5.

Seriously? I would say under a million...

I've gone and placed a link to a 3D perspective map of the Whispering Cairn on my blog for those curious as to what the tomb looks like when its all 'hooked' together.

Kobolds Ate Our Mules

The permissions are set so you should be able to download the map if you want to.

I want to give it up for Spirit of the Century as well.

allo

who built the first three levels (great hall, tomorast's hold, kerzit's fane) of maure castle? it's clear that these aren't part of the dungeons directly underneath maure castle, so who built them? eli tomorast?

For todays installment of Channeling your inner Gygax...

The Monk Level vs. Monster Height and Weight Matrix.

Monks can only do cool stuff (like stun) to enemies that are below a certain height. Want to really piss off your Monk player? Try "It's a really tall Type II Demon - This guy is on the Abyssal All Stars team in the fiendish basket ball league."

This was, of course, why monster height and weight was included in the monster description in 1E - it made a big difference if the bad guy was seven foot 6 inches or seven foot 8 inches.

Chris Mortika wrote:

Pax, how do Weapon Speed Factors and casting times play into that?

I don't use weapon speed factors, but that data can be found in first edition, and I seem to recall came into play whenever there was a tie, but I would need to check. Most of us didn't bother with those rules unless a player was attempting to weild a large clunky weapon under certain circumstances...

Weapon Speed also comes up when determining if a magic users spell is interrupted or not if the spell caster is being attacked by a weapon wielder.

Small business owner, IT Professional, Organic Food Saleman, Stay-at-home Dad**, Teacher, Advertiser, Accountant for the Canada Revenue Agency***.

**The Stay-at-home Dad's career orientated lawyer wife is the indirect provider of many good things at the gaming table since she does not ask her hubby what he spent the money he took from their account on...she just assumes diapers. I presume it usually is diapers but I mostly notice cool gaming books and all manner of desirable things. In fact if some one says 'we really should have X for the game' there is a pretty good chance that stay-at-home dad will bring it to next weeks game.

***Also a good source of materials - though mostly just stationary type stuff - all provided by the Canadian Tax Payer.

Haha, awesome.

Jeremy, for your blog, consider using a Picasa account to host your image files. It's free, and is already supported by Blogger through Google. You'll be able to hotlink directly from the blog without having to go through 4shared's download page.

Also, and it's not a huge deal since it's pretty obvious, but monster powers with circles around the attack icons are the basic attacks. In your document, you have the monsters' basic attacks using the icons for non-basic attacks. It's only a formatting concern, and only holds true if you want to follow the format WotC is using. It's not like one way makes any more sense than the other.

I created a more elaborate then normal encounter for the Feral Dog. Anyone interested in checking it out can download it from a Blog I opened to contain this sort of material.

Kobolds Ate Our Mules.

Just for fun I included a Paizo easter egg in this encounter. The Dog in the Dog Pit is a Goblin Dog from Scott Bett's conversion of Burnt Offerings.

Now as far as game play, yes I have seen it in a games. Not a lot but from time to time. One or our players is gay, he rarely plays gay characters though. Not honestly sure why, no one in the group has a problem with it.

have you checked out the second adventure in Second Darkness? I forget the name right now, but it had some pretty cool aliens.

After WotC dicked them around with the new DRAGONLANCE novels, I'm not entirely sure they'd be willing to work for WotC unless they stumped up a huge amount of cash.

As others have said - controller is the easiest to live without and its utility actually drops the smaller the group is because the number of potential targets that it can effect all at once keeps falling.

Most of the 3.5 products weren't even published by WotC itself, they farmed it out to Weis & Hickman's own publishing company, with the exception of the Campaign Setting itself which came out under the WotC flag so to speak. I don't know if something like this arrangement might not be in the cards again.

One of the things that made Dragonlance an attractive product was that Wies could write the campaign setting book in the most recent era - which no one cares about and then, after she had the license, write the War of the Lance supplement - which was of course the period that everyone actually cared about.

In any case WotC went through all the trouble of pulling her license for so they could get all their IP under one banner to support the DDI. They are not going to give her the license back - though they might get her and Hickman to actually do some work for them.

Hmm, you might be right here.

I'll have to look closely at the rest of the campaign, and may end up deciding to scale back the leveling goals. I do agree that, at first blush, the campaign doesn't appear to quite fit the flavor of "epic" in the same way that Scales of War or even Rise of the Runelords eventually does.

Also it makes much more sense to squeeze extra levels out of A History of Ashes, Skeletons of Scarwall and Crown of Fangs then the first three. You just have a lot more space to work with and are far less constrained with insuring that the story makes sense and is well paced.

I'd make everything for just before the War of the Lance. That was always the most popular period in any case.

I have a feeling WOTC wants to do a spell plague to Dragonlance but doesn't know how yet so they're doing Dark Sun.. wtf.. instead.

Oh and my money is on Dragonlance for the campaign setting released after Dark Sun. Its one of the ones mentioned in the players handbook and it has a huge following. I was surprised when Darksun trumped Dragonlance for this years release - I can't see WotC choosing to continue to ignore the armies of Krynn faithful for yet another year - there are swarms of fans desperate to give WotC their money in order to once again hold a Dragonlance Campaign book in their hands. Its now a matter of how long WotC can resist taking their money off them - I don't think WotCs will power is really that strong in this regards.

I went over and checked out your post. I will say that the idea of investigating some kind of alien from the Far Realms - especially some kind of Spell Jammer type ship from the Far Realms definitely intrigues me. Its been a long time sense we had any 'crash landing by aliens' type adventures and I can't really say I like most that where around in the mists of D&D past.

@Pop'N'Fresh

I'm deep into creating the Feral Dog encounter complete with a battle mat (which I just finished). I was planning on using your antagonists for this encounter and will probably post it for others to use when I'm done.

However I can't post something with your work embedded in it without your permission. So can I use your antagonists in this encounter write up if I credit you for your contributions?

I'm just updating this thread on my campaign's progress. The group has just taken out Grallak Kur and his minions quite easily. They had more issues with the inhabitants of room 19 in TFoE but ultimately prevailed.

They are taking out room 20 next week, then heading to Vecna's temple.

The group's paladin has been doing an excellent job playing the "tank". He marks multiple foes, get the crap beaten out of him, gets healed by one of the two clerics, or lays on hands himself, and keeps on trucking. The avenger is just insane to watch, he NEVER misses using his oath, and the 2 clerics are just great with their combined healing abilities.

We are having a blast. And as promised, I will post my conversion doc once the adventure is finished.

I believe the following web site

dragonlance nexus
http://www.dlnexus.com

has attempted to convert some of the beginning dragonlance modules to 4E format. I also read up on the previews, and they seem like a pretty straight forward interpretation that meets the essence of each type of draconian (for the ones listed).

I prefer taladas myself, versus ansalon, and will most likely start my next 4E setting.

It took me two freaking years to find a good group to play with (shout out to the Monday gamers!), so maybe I'm just a little frustrated with most of what I've seen in the "modern" gamer.

God, do you remember the "Forum Wars" about falling damage in Dragon back then?

Like they say, "Those n00bs who don't know history, are doomed to repeat it".

;)