Ok, maybe "love" isn't the right word. "Tolerate" might be better, but the sentiment is the same: for the first time in months, I'm looking forward to my gaming group's playtest of Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition.

First, some background. My gaming group's been together for 12 years and we've played in the World of Greyhawk that entire time. We've had a bunch of different campaigns, adventuring in our home grown city of Obsidian Bay, dealing with the rising threat of the Temple of Elemental Evil, and liberating the Grand Duchy of Geoff from the giant menace, but all that time we were in Greyhawk.

So yeah, our gaming group has some serious history.

D&D 4E is upon us ... and I've created my first character for the game. If I’ve learned one thing about the game in doing this, it’s that the 4E's mechanics don’t fit easily into the old fantasy molds. To that end, I’ve been building out my own 4E campaign setting called Planetorn (detailed in a previous "Game Theory" post), in which a terrible war is ripping through the planes, destroying worlds and tearing people from their realities.

Field General Zhoran is the first 4E character I’ve created for this setting, but he’s not the first character for the campaign setting: that honor belongs to Zilanderan the Second, the Book of Nine Swords swordmage I created for our D&D 3.x campaign.