WotC’s supplement,Primal Power: Options for Barbarians, Druids, Shamans, and Wardens presents expanded choices for each of the classes that draw power from the Primal Power Source.
It offers new possibilities for these classes in the same way that the books Divine Power, Arcane Power, andMartial Powerdid for their respective classes.
When I ran my 4E D&D playtest campaign, I decided to make it larger than life. That meant going planer. The churning unpredictability of the planes, the potential for exotic locations, the alienness of its inhabitants calls to my imagination. The Plane Below: Secrets of the Elemental Chaos, which details 4E's churning elemental wastes, is just my cup of tea. Or it would be if it had retained more of the 3E cosmology. As is it's more like a cup of chia; worth a sip, but not as satisfying as I'd hoped.
Arthur Dent beverage metaphors aside, The Plane Below is a 159-page source book that builds on the foundation laid down by last year's The Manual of the Planes. The Elemental Chaos is 4th Edition's catch-all planar setting for D&D's traditional elemental planes, as well as the Nine Hells, the Abyss, and the rest of the rest of the D&D cosmology that isn't the Astral Plane or Ravenloft.
I’m one of those who loves the printed word. PDFs are handy, but when it comes right down serious reading, I want my books and magaines culled from dead trees. As such, I was happy to see a review copy of Dragon Magazine Annual.
Although my D&D 4E playtest campaign has long since given way to an ongoing Star Wars game, I like to dabble in 4E. Not enough, however, to warrant getting a regular D&D Insider subscription, although I’ll happily admit that if they were still publishing Dragon and Dungeon in print, I’d still be a subscriber.
The Annual is for gamers like me, gamers who might read the occasional free article on Insider, but have been content to live offline for the most part. It also serves as a “best of” compilation, gathering together the most memorable and useful articles from the last year’s worth of articles.
In November I had the chance to do something I’ve never done before: play Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. Technically that’s not true – I’ve played D&D 4E plenty of times as a Dungeon Master, including my gaming group’s playtest campaign. But I’ve never sat at the table as a D&D 4E player.
The last time the Blackrazor Guild played D&D 4E, it was a paragon level playtest. I was the GM, and I found it incredibly frustrating. Our initial run had been at the heroic tier; paragon seemed to only add to the complexity of the game. Coupled with Player’s Handbook 2 classes like the wild mage, I felt like the game was getting bogged down in an endless stream of if/then statements. It was like spaghetti code turned into an RPG, and by the end of the session, I was done. If we played again, I wanted to be on the other side of the screen.
Quilleron is my second-ever character for D&D 4E (Field General Zhoran, a dwarven warlord, was my first) and the first I was able to run as a player. He was designed as a giant-killer for my gaming group's Revenge of the Giants campaign. You can read more about my thoughts on returning to D&D 4E in "D&D 4th Edition: A Player's Persepctive".
My gaming group recently returned to D&D 4th Edition with a megashot of the Revenge of the Giants supermodule. I talk about our experiences with Wizards of the Coast's homage to the original 1st Edition Against the Giants tournament modules on Episode #121 of The Tome Podcast.
I'm joined by Quinn Murphy of the excellent At Will 4E blog and regular Tome host Jeff Greiner. Check out the podcast.
Giants stalk the land, threatening one of the few flickering lights of civilization. Someone needs to deal with the threat ... and it turns out that's us.
My gaming group is returning to Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition with a megashot of Revenge of the Giants, the new super module from Wizards of the Coast. I received a review copy of the book in October, and at the time I knew it was a perfect chance for my group to experiment with 4th Edition again.
We played 4th Edition back in Summer 2008, but decided we didn't want to convert our regular campaign to the new game. A few of us have continued to dabble in 4E however, and there's been interest in getting another game together.
Revenge of the Giants is that game and we're going to carve off a huge chunk of it with an eight-hour marathon post-Thanksgiving session.
We’re heading back. A year after our last paragon-playtest of Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition (a one shot adventure set continued our Planetorn campaign) we’re going to be running Revenge of the Giants, a new megamodule for paragon-level characters.
I recently received a review copy of the module and that – plus the latest round of D&D actual play podcasts -- led me to get the 4E contingent of my gaming group back together.
When last we played 4E, I was the game master, and I walked away from the table having experienced something I’d never had in 20+ years of GMing: boredom.
My review of Eberron Campaign Guide for D&D 4th Edition is up on GameCryer.com. If you don't have time to read, then you can listen to me pontificate as a guest on The Tome with host Jeff Greiner and fellow guests Jeremiah McCoy and Nick DiPetrillo (from DungeonMastering).
The Tome episode is a monster of a show, at 1.5 hours, but we covered both the Eberron Campaign Guide and Eberron Player's Guide. It covers the game from a couple of perspectives: a newbie drawn to the setting by the new Player's Guide (McCoy), a casual fan who always liked the setting (that would be me) and a diehard Eberron fan (DiPetrillo).
Short version? The Campaign Guide is a great book, providing a comprehensive overview of the Eberron setting, while simultaneously showing that it is possible to upgrade a setting to D&D 4E without radically transforming it (as was the case with the Forgotten Realms). It's a book that needed Player's Handbook to really work, but it was well worth the wait.
Recently Chris Youngs at Wizards of the Coast wrote an editorial pointing out that people can role-play in D&D 4th Edition just fine without any rules actually governing said role-playing:
Fourth edition doesn't include some of the mundane mechanical elements of character building that 3rd Edition did. For example, certain skills (I'm looking at you Craft and Profession) enabled a player to feel like his character had some sort of grounding in the "real world" of the campaign. Odds were good that you never made a Craft or Profession check in your game, but having ranks in that skill made you feel connected to your character's background. In 4th Edition, those skills are gone. Why? Because we feel like a character's statistics don't represent the absolute truth of a character's story. That's right -- one of the reasons those skills (and other such elements from other editions) are gone is that we felt they hindered roleplaying.
This elicited some "Hear! Hear!"-style posts from gaming blogs: