Robot Viking

You have to love it when two things you really enjoy mesh together perfectly. In this case, those two things are”D&D” and “getting stuff for free.”

Sometimes you want to do more than just stand around and let your armor take the hits in combat. Can the newest edition of D&D accommodate active defenses? 4E created an elegant mechanic that allowed active defenses to be used easily, and that’s something I don’t want to see lost.

There’s a lot of back and forth on the question of damage resistance and the role of magic weapons in D&D. Many players are opposed to the antiquated +1 or better to hit mechanic. How can the damage rules provide an underlying mechanical skeleton that describes the physics of the game world without bogging the [...]

It’s been almost three years since Wizards of the Coast pulled all ebook versions of their RPG products from virtual shelves, and there’s no sign that they’re coming back. In the meantime, they’ve developed the Virtual Table, a way to play 4E D&D online. They’re heading in the wrong direction. Here’s why.

A brand new Book of Vile Darkness, specially tailored for 4E D&D, was released this week. Just in time for Christmas! It’s got all kinds of advice on making your campaign, encounters, monsters and maybe even your characters extra evil. Eeeeeeeeeevil. Plus, a poster map!

Heroes of the Feywild is the companion piece to Heroes of Shadow, a player’s option book that offers new races and classes for characters who seek to explore the enchanted wilderness that lies beyond the firelight.

The Id DM has become my favorite RPG blog. Any fool can write about RPGs (like me), but it’s something else altogether to conduct scientific analysis of actual statistics and quantify the concepts the rest of us talk about. His latest effort, analyzing the complexity creep of Fourth Edition D&D, is a tour de force.

By now, RPG publishers have the campaign setting guide down pat. Slap together a few gazetteers covering the region, detail some important NPCs, add a few plot hooks and subversive organizations and you’re done. The Neverwinter Campaign Setting takes a different angle. This is so much more than a list places to visit and people [...]

At his blog of general geekery, Greywulf’s Lair, Greywulf himself lays out some of the missteps Wizards has made in the creation and promotion of the D&D brand, comparing them to the things Games Workshop does right in promoting Warhammer 40K.

Blackbyrne Publishing’s Dark Veil Campaign continues with the fourth adventure in the series, Sands of Despair. The heroes have drawn deific attention, and even time itself becomes unstable as they traverse a desert that is not a desert in search of a magical artifact.

WoTC’s big push at this years Gen Con was a return to Neverwinter, the venerable northern city that’s been a major crossover location for decades. Most of our readers probably remember Neverwinter Nights, the Bioware game from 2002 — but there was an even older title with the same name that AOL ran as one [...]

The long-awaited third volume in Blackbyrne Publishing’s 4E Dark Veil adventure series has arrived. The Prophecy Revealed lets the PCs explore a jungle island infested by spiders and learn a strange secret that will shape their destinies.

So there I was spending all sorts of time, crafting monster stat blocks for a chief-lieutenant type of recurring foe for my players and what did they do? They beat the holy living bejeezus out of him before he could even fire off his heaviest powers. Now my recurring foe was recumbent in death. So [...]

It’s a been a tumultuous year for D&D. Last year’s Gen Con presentations were full of big ideas and a release schedule packed with ambition, including the beginner-friendly Essentials line. Eleven months later the release schedule has been trimmed, long-time Wizards’ employees have been laid off, and Essentials appears to have crashed and burned in [...]