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 Recent Posts
You can have as many templates as you can find a reason for. Some combinations are unlikely (a half-dragon gelatinous cube) and some are outrageously impossible (a celestial fiendish badger, a lich vampire), but in general, if you have a feasible story for it, you can go with it. Did I ever tell you about my unbeatable half-black-dragon half-brass-golem troll lich cleric?
The theme of my current game is "tying people to the back of wagons". Interrogation, intimidation, diplomacy, capturing enemies and and the forging of alliances are all done by tying them to the back of an ox-drawn cart. Much of the game has involved getting the cart repaired, getting the cart replaced (they have a wagon now), changing who pulls the wagon (used to be a chocobo, it's now two zombie oxen) or hiding in the wagon. The wagon contains one of every standard item of the Equipment section of the Player's Handbook.
Intending to run the campaign in Eberron, I can't help but feel as if Age of Worms is a little TOO Greyhawk, as well as referencing a lot of old stuff. The Ebon Triad is based around three Greyhawk/core deities, the dungeons are based around the Wind Dukes, the backstory includes that Wolf Spider fellow and the Rod of Seven Parts, and Kyuss plays a big role. Even the "mad cultists summoning a god" reminds me of Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. So yeah, it has a lot of Greyhawk in it, even after the conversion guidelines. I do like the conversion guidelines have managed to fit the adventure into Eberron, though, linking the Wolf Spider to the Age of Demons and so on.
Save for the "frogs in the moat" that reminds me too much of RttToEE, this is a pretty interesting and somewhat innovative adventure. I intend to run it at my next weekly session. Please use this thread to discuss the adventure. I have a question regarding the adventure. If the PCs avoid a combat, such as by not freeing the elemental, do they still gain experience? If not, doesn't it encourage PCs to pick unnecessary fights with creatures simply because they know they can beat them, which leans toward being an evil act?
I have to say, I love the new statblock format. It takes up twice the space of the old statblocks, but it's infinitely easier to use in a game. No more puttering about an entire paragraph looking for that little "Init +2" statement or a Spot/Listen modifier that might not even be listed. I can immediately see if something has spell resistance or an unusual immunity. It's super user-friendly. Is this statblock format copyright to Dungeon/WotC, or can third-parties use it?
I could not find Dungeon 123 at the website you provided, and as you can see from my name, I already have a subscription. The flaw is that my subscription only began at #125, and while my local newsagent turned out to have #124 in stock (letting me get in on this Adventure Path(tm) despite having missed the previous one), I still don't have #123. I have been unsuccessful at finding it on eBay.
I live in the UK. I'd like to buy Dungeon #123 for the first part of the three-part Shards of Eberron adventure, but to buy it from the website, the shipping would be prohibitively expensive. (I'm also not too impressed at the American international postal service after they lost my $120 shipment of animation cels.) Is there a more affordable way of obtaining the magazine?
I think the problem might in part be in the distribution. Unlike TSR, Wizards of the Coast aren't releasing a lot of adventures; other than the Sunless Citadel (Ashardalon was a pushover :D) and Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil (one of my players has played it seven times and tells me of the ways he killed Utreshimon each time). Many adventures nowadays have one or more of the following limitations that cap their sales, and thus their potential for a "shared experience": 1) They're specific to a campaign setting. Dragonlance or Eberron adventures will see a boost in sales among fans of those settings, but will also lose sales to people who aren't interested or don't want to buy a campaign setting book, or who are already fans of a different setting. Adapting an adventure across settings can be difficult (I already failed at converting RttToEE to Eberron). 2) They're published by a company a less recognised name. WotC official adventures will sell like hot cakes, but buyers will be less likely to buy a third-party product, which has lower production values, a less appealing cover and blurb, and a less recognisable name. Buyers fear that they may be buying a lower quality product if it's not official Wizards material. 3) They aren't on sale in the shops when people browse. Companies with less money to invest in their product may not be able to afford to have their adventure up on shelves all across the world. Some companies cannot even afford proper publishing or will be unsuccessful in securing a publisher, and thus will release their book in PDF only. 4) Nobody's making adventures like they used to. Wizards aren't making adventures that aren't Eberron, because from a business point of view it costs the same as a normal book but has much less of a market, as only DMs will buy adventures. Additionally, they want to build up Eberron, which is something new and different that they wholly own, as opposed to plain vanilla D&D which they don't really have a monopoly over. The limited market for adventures is a drawback for PDF publishers too - while PDFs have a low per-item cost past the initial creation, they will still sell far less than an equivalent PDF of spells or prestige classes. Thus a problem is that it's difficult in the current market for any one adventure to get massively popular; among the "fits any setting" adventures which have the potential to gain amazing popularity, all are published by third parties, many of whom lack the official and professional air of an official Wizards of the Coast product, and most of whom do not have wide enough coverage of distribution for anyone one adventure to become globally well known.
Although my current level 7 campaign means that I'm not running Age of Worms for at least a month yet, I'm making plans to run it in Eberron. In "The Three Faces of Evil", and in the rest of the adventure path, how do I adapt the Greyhawk deities that compose the Ebon Triad to Eberron? Do I just pick three out of the Dark Six or what?
Half-Celestial progression was done by Sean K. Reynolds in his book Anger of Angels, published by Malhavoc Press. This is most likely why he never did it for the Savage Progressions article series on the official website. Likewise, the Celestial template is in that book too, which is why it was never on the website. Anger of Angels details how the template might be gained by an existing character, which was the intent of the half-elemental article, although it touched on the idea briefly. If you're interested in the idea of angels in a D&D game I'd suggest buying the book in PDF form, it shouldn't be too expensive at the moment. If you're only looking for a half-celestial progression, you can take the half-fiend progression and change it to match the half-celestial template.
First ability it gets is the ability to break out of stuff - walk through walls of force, break out of grapples, ignore entanglement and stuff. It explains how it got out of being imprisoned. (You'd generally have to be quite powerful to break out of being imprisoned, so this would make it a template to add to high level characters or powerful creatures.) They'd also probably go somewhat nuts without any human contact, so I'd continue by dropping their Wisdom (and applying Diplomacy/Bluff/etc penalties), upping their Charisma a load, if they're a divine spellcaster or something they might like to change their primary spellcasting stat to Cha too because all their power comes from being REALLY ANNOYED, throw in high spell resistance for good measure, Cha to AC as deflection, and throw in some spell-likes and resistances for good measure. Top it off with darkvision and glowy eyes to make them look cool.
Maybe you could write an article on good spells combos for Clerics. Everyone still thinks of Clerics as Healer/Fighters yet with the right choice of spells I'm sure a Cleric could be a deadly spellcaster. I always think of the cleric as a fairly deadly spellcaster anyway, to the point that people in my games often play cleric rather than wizard when it comes to being a damage-dealer. At the middle levels they get Flame Strike and Slay Living, and their buff spells, while active, can make them better fighters than fighters.
...odd, I just made a post and it was blank. A bug in the system? What I was going to say was, to get onto IRC visit http://www.xchat.org/windows/ and download X-Chat (I like it better than mIRC), and add the chat network irc.psionics.net to your list. It's generally good for online games of D&D. Ask in, say, #D&D3e . If you don't know how to use IRC software, you can read up here: http://www.irchelp.org/ Other good servers, but not ubiquitously D&D, are irc.esper.net and irc.pyoko.org.
Was the Shadow Apostle intentionally locking out clerics not built with the BoVD or FRCS? I notice that the new spells in the Erebus sidebars are solely Sor/Wiz as well. If they were divine spells too, then there'd be a chance for a straight cleric to EVENTUALLY qualify. But no! A very good point. Perhaps it was designed primarily as a sorcerer/wizard class, but they saw no reason to ban clerics from the class, and added it in as an afterthought without realising that a straight core cleric couldn't ever qualify. In that case, the only way to take it would be to use a non-core cleric domain or introduce a new cleric spell with the darkness or shadow descriptors.
Yeah, if there's something a player in my game uses a lot - such as in one game, a player was using the lycanthrope progressions, and another where a player made alchemial items from one issue. Well, I used to. Nowadays, half of my D&D group buys Dragon anyway, and they always seem to get it before me. (Now all they need to do is to buy all the books I use to run the game, and I won't have to carry anything but my campaign notes and dice to the game...)
I'd like to see a few Eberron articles too. However, I asked Dragon about this before and they said they weren't interested in running anything Eberron-specific. Presumably this is because something Eberron-specific can't be used by anyone who doesn't have the Eberron book. I understand where they're coming from - I don't usually read the Faerun articles, since I never run games in Forgotten Realms.
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