Nuketown

Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition

What I want from D&D Next

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Sun, 01/22/2012 - 11:12pm

Wizards of the Coast has announced D&D Next, the successor to D&D 4th Edition aimed squarely at unifying the game's fractured fan base. My gaming group is practically a case study for 5th Edition -- we played 2nd Edition, 3rd Edition (both flavors), and 4th Edition, but finally gave up on the game when the group couldn't agree on which version to play. 60% of the group wanted to play D&D 3x or the Pathfinder Beta, 40% wanted to play D&D 4th Edition. We split the difference and played Star Wars: Saga Edition, which addressed many of our issues with both systems, and gave us a much needed break from the fantasy genre.

We've since returned to fantasy ... but not D&D. Instead we're playing the Pathfinder RPG and Paizo's Second Darkness adventure path. I can't speculate on what it would take to bring the Blackrazor Guild back to D&D -- we simply haven't talked about it enough -- but I know that I am looking for.

Harrowing Halls: Taking Dungeon Tiles to the 3rd Dimension

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Tue, 08/31/2010 - 4:30am

Harrowing HallsHarrowing Halls is a Dungeon Tiles set for Dungeons & Dragons that takes the long-running line to new heights. That's because they're not just dungeon tiles ... they're three dimensional dungeon tiles that can be used to build a staircase, raised platforms, tables, and pedastals, all of which player characters can jump on, leap off of and generally use to their advantage.

It makes a big difference on many fronts, starting with prep time. I got a review copy of Harrowing Halls a few months ago, but since I run a weekly Star Wars game I haven't had much call for a rustic hall/dungeon. That changed when I decided to run an epic showdown with a Jedi master in a temple on a stormwracked backwater world.

Looking for Dark Sun web sites

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Thu, 04/29/2010 - 11:36am

Dark Sun, the grim, post-apocalyptic fantasy setting for Dungeons & Dragons is re-launching this summer for D&D 4E. In honor of that, I'm writing my next "Summon WebScryer" column for Knights of the Dinner Table about Dark Sun ... but I need your help.

I need web sites dedicated to the setting. I've found a bunch, but I'd like more, particularly ones dealing with the intersections of D&D 4E, psionics and Dark Sun. Old school D&D sites are also welcome of course, but obviously 4E ones are a bit more timely.

Here's what I've got -- you can submit your suggestions by adding a comment below or emailing me at nuketown@gmail.com.

Game Day: Return to the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Fri, 03/05/2010 - 9:13am

After many months away from the game, my group is returning to Dungeons & Dragond 3rd Edition for an old school dungeon crawl through the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth using the D&D 3.5 version released in 2007.

I've got mixed feelings about this.

While I owned the Lost Caverns as a kid and read through it cover to cover several times, I never had a chance to run it. Moreover, with this module we're going to continue what we started with our White Plume Mountain run by travelling back into our D&D campaign's history to the founding of the Blackrazor Guild. In White Plume Mountain, guild leader Brant Bladescream recovered the infamous soul-devouring sword Blackrazor (but lost most of his adventuring companions in the process). In The Lost Caverns, he's taking a new band of heroes into the depths of an infamous dungeon in search of even more powerful magical relics.

Role-playing Mechanics: The Third Way

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Mon, 08/10/2009 - 10:31am

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:

Game Day: Return of the Revenge of White Plume Mountain

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Fri, 03/27/2009 - 5:45pm

In 12 years of adventuring in Greyhawk, our group built up a number of legends, told, but never experienced. The recovery of the soul-devouring sword Blackrazor is one of them.

Brant Bladescream, warrior, adventurer and conman, recovered Blackrazor from the volcanic dungeon known as White Plume Mountain and used its notoriety to found the Blackrazor Guild. The guild would go on to become one of the cornerstones of our Greyhawk campaign, and last year we decided to finally play out the events in which Brant secured the epic blade. We were aided in this quest by Wizards of the Coast, which updated the classic S2 White Plume Mountain to the 3.5 rule set in 2005.