4E Dragon Magazine Annual - A Review

Continuing a bit with the unplanned theme of the week my favorite resource during the 1E & even 2E era was Dragon Magazine. I have a copy of every Dragon Annual published to date. This includes the first one with the original ads from 1980 which I use as back-to-basics inspirational material when I feel a little lost running a campaign.

The second volume had a bunch of material from my original time with AD&D and Dragon

The third volume had Roger Moore's races and racial god articles among other things.

These first 3 volumes were much-used resources during my AD&D years in the 1980's. I was constantly going back and reading through them when starting or running campaigns or when trying to figure out a new angle for a new character. I would recommend them even today if someone was running a 1E campaign - they give a very good sense of the feel of the era. Love those cover prices too.

Volumes 4 &5 pretty much finish out the 1E/2E era for these things. I acquired these later so I was not as attached to them as the first 3.

There were several more traditional volumes during the 3E era but I was not terribly impressed with them, especially compared to the older volumes. However, once Paizo took over publication from WOTC they went and put together a very cool product called the Dragon Compendium which included 3E updates of things from all through Dragon's history. This include 1E material like the Death Master class. It was definitely a grab-bag approach but there was some good material in there. Plus it was a nice, big full-color hardback - that doesn't hurt. There was hope that there would be additional volumes, but that never happened.

 With the launch of 4th Editioon D&D in June of 2008 WOTC adopted a new policy. Dragon would now be on-line-only, ending the 30+ years of the paper magazine's run. This did nothing to convince me that 4th was a good idea and in fact was a mark against it in my eyes as it was behind a paywall. I ignored it, much as I ignored 4E at the time. Fast-forward to 2009 and my interest in 4E begins to come back around after a year or so of ignoring it.  In August of 2009 WOTC published the Dragon Magazine Annual, billed as a collection of the best material from the 1st year of the 4E online dragon. I read some reviews not long after it came out and was unimpressed - the reviews had a lot of "I already have this online" and "this is pointless" type comments and the material discussed didn't seem all that impressive or useful.

Fast forward again to August of 2010 and I am actually running a 4E campaign and have been furiously playing catch-up on 4E books. I came across a very reasonably priced copy of this book online and decided to pick it up for completeness sake. It's a nice 160 page full-color hardback and having read through it now I have to say this is actually a very useful book - details below.

 DM Material: The book opens with an article on Yeenoghu, demon lord of Gnolls and reading it after having read Manual of the Planes it fits extremely well into that material - stats, new monsters, descriptionos of Yeenoghu's home plane, and a sample secret cult of his followers.

Next up is an article on Kobolds that includes 8 new kobolds and some suggestions on traps they might use in their lairs. It's only a few pages but it's immediately useful in a low-level campaign as kobolds show up regularly in levels 1-5 especially. It just so happens that the area of my campaign that my players are getting to happens to be infested with kobolds - and yes they were revised a bit after I read this article.

The Ashen Covenant is an article on cults of Orcus, specifically one that is not just about random destruction and sacrificing of maidens, but one that has a larger goal and several plans on how to get there. It includes adventure hooks, NPC stats for the cult leaders, and some new monsters & magic items. I like this kind of thing because even though Orcus is not set to play a big role in the campaign right now, knowing I have an article like this gives me a pre-made cult to drop in if a player takes an interest in fighting Orcus or picks some kind of paragon path or epic destiny involving him. Basically something could come up in one session and knowing that I have this I could lay some groundwork and then make it a set part of the campaign by next session.

Mithrendain, Citadel of the Feywild is a location description of an Eladrin city in the Feywild. It reads like an entry from Manual of the Planes. It includes a description, NPC stats for notables and guards, some new powers and feats for players associated with the city, a paragon path, and some new magic items. Again we have a nice drop-in location that gives me a specific place in the Feywild if I need one on short notice for the campaign. If I have a player who wants to be from the Feywild, I have a nice little article to give them. If the party ends up spending time in the city then i have some specific goodies to give them related to it- this is exactly the kind of material that 4E needs more of - useful nuggets.

Later we have the Bloodghost Syndicate, a secret criminal organization run by bugbears. This didn't tickle my fancy  as much as some of the others but it's a nice descriptive article that includes some NPC's, some new monster types, and a sample hideout. Again it's a nice drop-in organization with a short history and some defined goals that's not tied to any particular campaign world so if the need arises I have another badguy group I can play if I need one.

Intelligent items is a short article on adding intelligent magic items into your 4e game. This is a callback to older editions of the game and I like to see this kind of thing showing up in the current edition. It's mostly a discussion of how to implement them and it contrasts them with artifacts which have already been described in the game as being intelligent. It's a good article and has a lot of examples and sample items to illustrate the techniques and approach described.

There is a short adventure description about a red dragon. It's a level 11 encounter with some setup that is kind of a reverse-Christmas scenario. It's only a few pages but it is again a nice drop-in thing that could help out if the players are traveling or to set up a future fight at low levels.

The biggest section of the book is a 30-page section (divided into 2 articles) on arena fighting and gladiators. I have to say this was the section of the book I enjoyed the least. It's a good article and all but this is not something that has ever come up in my D&D games in the past (I did run some arena fights in a Rifts campaign but that's the only time) and I don't expect it to come up in a campaign anytime soon. Plus, this isn't the kind of thing I would just drop in to a game either - it takes some setup and planning to integrate into an ongoing campaign and it's not part of the classic dungeon romp so it seems to me to be a bit of a limited subject for such a big chunk of the book. I also suspect that it's been superseded by material for the Dark Sun campaign, making it even less useful now. Maybe not, but outside of Dark Sun I can't see it coming up regularly. I don't dislike the material, it's just of more limited usefulness than a lot of the rest of the book.

The book wraps up with 4 articles that are mainly player-focused.

Playing Dhampyr is of consuming interest if you have a player that wants to play a vampire PC right from the start. I haven't tried it but it looks well done and gives background, feats, powers, paragon paths, and a few new monsters. With all the attention on vampires ala Twilight and True Blood I can see this one getting some use in an otherwise typical campaign.

The next article is Masters of the Planes which is a set of epic-destinies related to the various outer planes. I thought the Prince of Hell was pretty interesting as it's somewhat similar to the ascension of a chaos lord in Warhammer.

Playing Shadar-Kai is the next article and it's as complete as the Dhampyr article, so if you have a player that wants to play something pretty exotic then this should work. They don't strike the same chord with me as the vampire article did but I can see them having a place in some campaigns.

The final article is Art of the Kill, a discussion of assassins and assassination that includes backgrounds, feats, paragon paths, and items related to these things. I can see it being somewhat useful but my players aren't really inclined  in that direction so it will probably not see much use in my games. It does look like a pretty thorough handling of the non-shadow powered assassin in 4E.

So what do I think overall? I think it's a damned handy resource for the 4E DM. I thin kit's a waste of money for a player as most of the content is aimed at DMs.  Those first six articles make the book for me as I can see ways that all of them could come up in a game in general and in my game specifically over the next few months. I can't really give it any higher praise than that.  I will say however that the $29.95 cover price is high for this book. Compared to something more focused and mechanically useful like the power books this is a grab bag product that will likely be used in limited chunks over several years. Look for it on sale or online or in some discounted form and I expect you will be happier with your purchase.

Useful DM Resources

My review of Dungeon Delve got me to thinking about other products that have been useful to me in running games over the years - not planning a campaign, not organizing material, but actually running a game, with players. So I will talk about a few of them below:

For 1st edition AD&D it was definitely Dragon. Adventures, new monsters, new magic items, new NPC's, spellbooks, articles on and descriptions of monsters that lead to an idea on doing something new - old-school Dragon was a regular source of great fluff, great crunch, and a ton of usable stuff.  It seemed to drop off to me somewhere in the early 100's but up until then there was something in almost any issue that I could use very quickly. I initially thought "Pages from the Mages"was a stupid series until my PC's killed a fairly tough wizard and I had no notes on his spellbook contents - guess what they found? I had PC's wash up on a strange island and I didn't want to use a "regular" monster - thank you Creature Catalog. Running into something you don't recognize after perusing the Monster Manual regularly for several years packs a pretty good punch. Low level PC's supposedly on their way to catch a ship to Bone Hill stop for rumors in a village bar and end up going into Little Boy Mountain to fight Chagmat. It was a very broad resource but a very handy one at times and I miss it even now.

For 2E this boxed set inspires very mixed emotions among Greyhawk aficionados as it's cool to finally have a boxed set on the center of the campaign world, but Gary Gygax, creator of the whole thing, had nothing to do  with this product. Elements of it are there, but it doesn't feel quite like the description in the earlier material or Gary's novels - it feels more like a Forgotten Realms city in some ways. Anyway, it's not the city itself that I am focusing on in this case but the adventure seeds included in the box on cardstock. These are small adventures taking up one 8 1/2 X 11 card front & back. There is usually a small map and some monster stats and the rest is description of what's happening and why. I used some of these cards in every 2E campaign I ran, at different levels, and in different campaigns. There's a low-level one that involves a faerie dragon and some goblins making mischief in a winery, one involving ogres that have been converted to good by a local cleric and what happens when they revert to evil, one about watching a store for a merchant friend while he takes care of some other business, a bathhouse full of frogs, and others that deviate from the typical dungeon full of badguys format. They are nicely different and very easy to drop in wherever needed. A book full of these things would have been an incredible resource but these filled the bill for several years.

For 3E I pulled down OGL stats for the monsters in MM1 and printed them out on index cards and kept them in a box at the table behind my screen. I added more over the years including unique creations with templates and class levels and that's pretty much how I ran my monsters for 3E - I didn't need to stat them out in my notes as I had my cards. I just noted something like 10 Human Bandits Class D, 4 Class C, and 1 Class B and then referred to the cards when it came up. Where this broke down was Dragons. Dragons have a bunch of special abilities including spells that make it nearly impossible to fit onto a card. Even the monster manual entries (my usual fallback for non-carded monsters) don't detail spells as those are chosen individually for each dragon. In 3E they tend to show up more than in earlier editions because of a refocus on classic D&D themes and because there are appropriate versions at all levels They're complex and have huge statblocks too, so a book of prefigured dragons complete with lair maps was a very nice thing to have. It also makes it much easier to include dragons on random encounter tables which I have always liked, especially for cross-country travels. It was a very focused product but a very handy one if Dragons popped up with any frequency in your game.

Yes, I'm looking at games besides D&D too. For d6 Star Wars this book contained Equipment, Vehicles, Ships, Races, Creature stats, Stormtrooper stats, and prominent NPC stats. With the rulebook and this book, you could run a rebellion era game for a very long time. Now a lot of material was added later, but if it was in one of the first 3 movies, this book covered it and that was good enough for most of us at the time. It was a monster manual, arms & equipment guide, rogues gallery, and a race handbook all rolled into one.

 

For Hero System, mainly Champions, this is a very handy resource. The Bestiary is the best but I'm assuming anyone running a campaign already has that book. This one might be overlooked though as it's nothing but NPC's. Wonderful, pre-statted pre-personality'd NPC's, from cops to crooks to mad scientists to reporters to truckers - all there to be used as contacts, dependent NPC's, hostages, victims, anything, really. They can be dropped in to any modern setting and they will work just fine. They are built at various point levels from incompetent to skilled to low-end heroes to specials like Sparky the Wonder Dog. It's just very handy in actually running a game. Champions is a game where you can make anything but you don't always want to have to do it in the middle of a game and this book helps quite a bit in avoiding that.

For Shadowrun this book contained new contacts, new archetypes, a bunch of maps of things like a subway station and various apartment buildings, and some short adventures that could be dropped in at almost any time. Plus it detailed how credsticks work in the world and how the law codes and equipment worked in the game world too. It was just a big batch of awesome when it came to actually running a game - not advice, not background fluff, but good small scenarios, maps of places shadowrunners were likely to be, and stats for the opposition you might find. I used it well into 3rd edition SR and would probably do it again if I ran a new campaign today.

Finally the Traveller book that saved me the most work, 1001 characters. This book has a bunch of statlines for characters created using the normal chargen system in Traveller Book 1. Seems pretty mundane, right? It's not because it saves actual work and time.  Most Traveller fans would probably list 76 Patrons here but I always thought it was overrated as it only gave adventure seeds, not actual adventures. I never had a problem with ideas, but not having maps and stats and details to back them up makes them difficult to use in play on the fly. Supplement 1 however could be used both in advance (Pilot sitting at bar is #45 in S1) and on the fly when one needed stats for an NPC. Yes, I could probably make them up on the fly but I've noticed I tend to repeat myself if that happens too much so I like the unbiased list to pull from rather than handwaving it myself. It's not a flashy or pretty book but it is very handy at the table in play.

Honorable Mentions: For 1E the Rogue's Gallery includes some pregen stats and NPC's. For 3E the DMG includes a lot of NPC sample stats and was used a lot by me in the early days. The 3E supplement "Everyone Else" has stats for NPC types like bartenders and blacksmiths and can be handy at times. The Star Wars Revised Core Rulebook contained stats for a lot of NPC types at various levels from stormtroopers to space pirates to smugglers and was very handy for on-the-fly use. Every Marvel Super Heroes supplement was chock full of heroes and bad guys with full game stats. Every Savage Worlds campaign book comes with full stats for opposition, creatures, and even vehicles - they are very well done. Mutants and Masterminds also has a nice list of opponents from ninjas to cops to robots in a section at the back - all very useful when the night goes off track. Drop in some ninjas and watch the action begin.

As you can see IMO anything that gives me statted up and equipped NPC's, maps, usable detailed adventures, and basically saves me mechanical work during the session rates very highly with me. I like a lot of the theoretical how to be a better DM or monster ecology type books too but in the heat of the game when you're trying to make a world come alive for your players there is no better friend for the DM than prepared material that he doesn't have to prepare.

Return to the Ruins of Adventure - Session 5: Roadblock!

Over a month ago our heroes completed their quest to slay the goblin chief in the slum section of the ruins. Since then they have been spending their money and time in the civilized section of Phlan. Low on cash, Kordan, Javanni, and Mikal decide to see if the council needs any more help. As it turns out they do.

Councilman Barnabus thanks them for freeing the slums although resettlement is going somewhat slower than they had hoped. Some of this is due to a new problem in that kobolds have taken over Kuto's Well, cutting off a major source of fresh water for the settlement effort. Kuto was one of the original settlers of the area and he built a fort around the well. Early settlers also gathered around what is now civilized Phlan for access to the harbor. The city grew up as these two sections grew together and the Slums are what was once this middle section joining the two early settlements. So reclaiming the well is important both for symbolic reasons and for the practical needs of a) fresh water, b) a buffer zone past the Slums themselves, and c) a fortified location at the far end of the settlement to help hold off attacks from the monster-infested ruins of the rest of the city. Barnabus offers the party 1000gp per person or the choice of a treasured magical item upon delivery of the kobold chieftain's head.   The party agrees and sets out for the well.

Now being unable to locate their wizard the team advances with some caution. Passing through the Slums they see the occasional beggar moving through the rubble but that's about the only sign of life. Finally they come to the end of the slum section and see a stone structure some distance away through heavily rubbled streets. They advance.

Nearing the well the group uses a mostly cleared roadway to speed their travel. Up ahead, though, they spy a roadblock and note that several side streets have been block off as well. Observing for a few minutes, they see small shapes behind the roadblock and a few more figures up on some nearby rooftops - kobolds.

Kordan (Fighter) and Mikal (Warlock) take a left and try to make an indirect advance on the kobold position while Javanni (Bard) advances just enough to put the enemy in range of his vicious mockery and begins taunting the scaly ones.

Turning a corner, Kordan and Mikal exchange fire with the westernmost kobold rooftop sentries. They are slain fairly quickly but not before both heroes have been tagged with seriously foul-smelling missiles. The heroes then close in on the roadblock as Javanni takes the other rooftop sentry out of the fight with his incredibly harsh language.

Battle is joined as Kordan smashes through the roadblock and into a Kobold Dragonshield. Mikal lays down curses and eldritch blasts on multiple foes while Javanni sings a veritable song of abuse, throwing in some common kobold names to spice things up and scoring as several enemies look up in open-mouthed horror at the things he is saying about their nest-mothers.Kordan takes a few good blows from Kobold spears but in the end the trio blows through the watchmen like a summer storm, leaving no survivors.

Looking around the team gathers up what clues they can and decides to go back and find their wizard, and maybe some other assistance, before they assault the well itself.

DM Notes: This was our first D&D session in quite a while and ended up only involving the setup and one encounter, mostly due to excessive chit-chat. I say excessive but part of the fun is a group of friends getting together and catching up on things and that took a lot of time this time. Also, Lady Blacksteel had other plans and was not available to run her character for the evening so the party was down to 3. Now I build my encounters for the 4E standard 5 man party and I'm not inclined to weaken them but the party blew through them pretty well. I admit I didn't make the bulk of the kobolds very active opponents but they were guarding a roadblock so it made sense to me in the context of the encounter. Next time will not be as easy.

The good news is that we may have picked up another player, bringing us up to the officially-endorsed 5-man party. Also, clearing a lot of the getting-back-together-after-a-long-gap stuff cleared out and getting the mission set up out of the way means we can dive right in next session and that next session is this coming Friday so we will have some momentum going in. It's good to be rolling again.

4E Dungeon Delve: A Review

Dungeon Delve is a 192 page hardcover that was published in February 2009 to fairly mundane reviews. I picked it up a while back but it wasn't really a priority. as I was busy designing and starting my first 4E campaign. One of my own rules while doing this was that I didn't want to read any published 4E adventure material as I wanted to figure it out myself.  Feeling fairly solid with those arrangements now I sat down to read it over the weekend and was very impressed.

The concept for the book is to publish a short adventure for every level from 1-30. Each "Delve" starts with a few paragraphs of background, an overview map , a note on what set of dungeon tiles was used to make the map, and some notes on how to expand it beyond the encounters given. Each encounter has a more detailed map including the monster locations, complete monster stats, a setup section, tactical notes, and details on any features in the area like statues that could be pushed over or ledges to fall off of or secret doors or the like. Everything that the DM needs to run the encounter is right there, usually on 1 or 2 facing pages.

The introduction to the book talks about different ways to use this material including a DM Training Tool (not a terrible idea) and as a boardgame type affair where it's openly DM vs. Players - I thought that was Descent . Those are fine but they are not the highest purpose of this book.

The greatness of this book is in having a huge pile of prepared, fully statted-out mini-dungeons with short simple backgrounds. As anyone who has DM'd an ongoing campaign knows, this kind of material is incredibly valuable. If you're running a specific adventure and the players know it or if you're running one-shots then it's not as important as everyone tends to be focused on the task at hand but in a classic open-ended serial campaign the players pretty much decide where they are going next and that's not always some place you have prepared. Even if you are running a known adventure players will go back to town and then go traipsing off in another direction. When this happens it's very handy to have some other material you can drop in as a side adventure - sometimes as the goal of the side trip and sometimes as a delay along the way so that you can finish writing up the goal before the next session.  Plus the size of each - 3 encounters -  is perfect as that's about how many my group can get through in a typical night. The descriptions are also perfect - a paragraph or 3 about the location, who the monsters are and why they are there is exactly what this kind of adventure needs and it's specific to the encounter, not to any campaign world.

Old School Notes - This book is similar to the Book of Lairs or Adventure Pack I - premade encounters with monster stats and maps that can be dropped in as needed. Now the encounters are not as large-scale as some of the Lair setups - no 130 Brigands or 249 Sahaugin - nor are they as involved as the adventures in AP, but they are very similar as far as intended use.

What if you don't play 4th edition? Well, it's not a whole lot of use in that case. The maps are fairly simple and the feature notes include DC's for climbing up on things or breaking things that could be used with 3E characters. The monsters would have to be replaced though, so some of the utility of the book would be lost but the maps and the concepts might be enough of a head start to make it easier than doing your own from scratch. For 1E or 2E DM's there isn't much here. The concept, though, is very good and there's no reason it couldn't be used to make up a similar product for 1E/2E.

This book is a godsend for my own 4E campaign which is set in Phlan and inspired by the old Gold Box game. In that game the main adventuring area is the city itself but there are several small adventures set outside of the city and I have been debating how to incorporate them into the campaign. I don't want them to replace big chunks of my carefully designed city zones but I want players to have the option to head outside of the city -especially those who remember the old game - and look for trouble. They could also be used as XP catch-up missions for characters who sit out a session or two. So I was thinking of making up some set pieces of 1-5 encounters using the themes of the original - an orc lair, a lizardman lair,a wizard's laboratory, and others - but now I don't really have to as I have Dungeon Delve and I can place whatever I need depending on the level of the characters involved. I may still do the laboratory as it was a pretty big part of the original and I had already figured it in as one of my higher-level areas, but the other little side encounters will most likely be handled by adventures from this book. What higher praise can I give than I like it and expect to be using it in the next month or two. If you;re running a traditional campaign using 4E then it's an immediately useful book for you as a DM and it's something you will want in your toolkit.

Motivational Monday

Accidental Rebels - Session 2

This was a short session but it served to get the thing back on track after a month-long layoff. The heroes begin back in the detention center. Last session, Walex opened the turboshaft doors despite the lack of power only to be attacked by an interrogation droid which the rest of the party quickly dispatched. Now the party decides to climb down the shaft to try and head for the hangar bay where they hope to find the wookie smuggler's ship and escape.

Moving downward they cross several areas of no-power, survive some bounces and bumps as the ship suffers more explosions, and eventually find a door they can open. Moving forward they find the rooms and corridors beyond deserted, not something they expected on a star destroyer.

Eventually they find a computer terminal and tap in, pulling up a schematic of the ship and some status reports describing the amount of damage the ship has sustained - it is massive. They also find that the ship has been set to self-destruct in 3 hours. This new information spurs them to action - find the hangar bay!

As they hurry off, Walex notes that he could modify the self-destruct system to go off sooner than the imperials expect but the rest of the group looks at him like he's crazy - trapped on a burning crippled star destroyer that's rigged to blow and you want to speed that up? There are no buyers for what he's selling.

The nearest downward passage goes through engineering and the group passes perilously close to one of the sublight engines which is on fire. Moving carefully they avoid any incidents, sealing a door behind them just as the engine explodes

Moving through this new level the group is startled when a mouse droid wheels around the corner and squeaks at them. It's promptly blasted into fragments by the pirate and the jedi then stomped on by the wookie, thoroughly squashing the hapless bot. But a short time later as they move through an intersection they hear a noise behind them and turn to see a squad of stormtroopers fanning out across the corridor behind them...

4E Draconomicon - Chromatic Dragons: A Review

Some Perspective:

The first Draconomicon was published in 1990 for AD&D 2nd Edition. It was a 128 page softcover that was mostly fluff with a little crunch, mainly some new dragons, and then a set of dragon-centric adventures at the end. It was alright but even back then I remember being a little disappointed in the content. The adventures ate up about a 3rd of the book which I thought could have been put to better use. I did like the idea of a special book just for Dragons as they are the iconic beasties of the game, I just thought this wasn't the best effort in that direction.

Fast forward 13 years and we have the Draconomicon for 3.5 which I thought was excellent - 288 hardcover pages of mostly crunchy details covering all then-current types of dragons and adding some to the mix. While much of the book was aimed at DM's, a fair chunk of it was also aimed at players with a chapter on fighting dragons, a section of dragon-flavored spells and feats, and a section on using dragons in the party. The book wrapped up with sample lairs for each dragon type and statblocks for each type of dragon at each age category. There was fluff on environment and physiology and personality which was helpful too, but much of the book was game mechanics and details intended to be used in play. If you were planning or running a dragon-heavy campaign it was an excellent resource all the way around. WOTC would later follow a similar format for an Undead book, an Aberrations book, a Demon book, and a Devil book and I thought all of them were similarly useful.

Now jump to 2008 and we have the first 4th edition monster-specific book, 256 hardcover pages also named Draconomicon and subtitled Chromatic Dragons. Right away we know the focus of this edition has been narrowed by half - it only covers the evil dragons.It opens with 40 or so pages of Dragon background - physiology, personality, general fluff discussions. We then have 46 pages of DM material including magic items, sample adventure hooks, and hoard breakdowns. The next major chunk of the book is 76 pages of sample lairs - very nice and much more useful than the 2E adventures. We then close out the book with 90 pages of new monsters.

By section:

The Background section is nicely done and is probably more than most people really need but I think that's the way to err in this kind of book. I liked it and for a new player or DM it's a great starting place to build up your knowledge of dragons.

The DM material is fine. I thought it was the least focused section of the book. The encounter advice is fine, the adventure hooks are limited, the campaign outline is interesting, and the hoard section is almost more detail than we need (lots of tables), feeling like a throwback to 3E or even 2E in some ways - that's not a bad thing, just unusual in a 4E book.

The Lair section includes 9 dragon lairs fully mapped and statted out including traps, guards or minions, and the dragon itself. It's very well done and is instantly useful to the point that the DM could drop one of these in if the party took a sudden wrong turn in the middle of a session and decided to seek out a dragon instead of continuing on a particular adventure.

The last third of the book is monsters - descriptions and statblocks - with draconic themes. There are things in here ranging from new types of dragons to new types of kobolds including some new templates, alternate dragon powers, and some legendary dragons like Dragotha the undead dragon.

Overall I liked the book. It gives a DM much more information to work with than the Monster Manual entries alone. It gives a DM a bunch of dragon-flavored monsters to add to their campaign. It gives the DM drop-in lairs requiring no extra work. These are all great things to have even if your game does not center around dragons specifically.

The only real downside is that there is no player material in this book. The 3.5 book included a fair amount of material on dragon-slaying and even dragon-recruiting which does not appear here. It's not critical but it would be nice to see material like that somewhere as stuff like that gets players brains and creativity flowing. Maybe it's in a Dragon article somewhere but I don't know as I don't subscribe to DDI.

The only other thing I came away from this book with that might be a negative is that I'm not sure we need a separate book on each subtypes - Chromatics, Metallics, and presumably others down the road. The statblocks are longer in 4E, it's true, and I don't have a huge problem with it, but it does look a little like padding. Part of the 4E business theory appears to be that multiple books on one subject are OK - PHB 1-2-3, MM 1-2-3, Martial Power 1-2 - so I suppose Draconomicon 1-2-3 fits right in there. I don't have the Metallic Dragons book  at this point but I will and one of the considerations in  that review will be "was this book truly neccessary?"

Wrapping up, I think D&D does benefit from a separate book on Dragons - they are iconic opponents in  the game usable at all levels and they tend to be one of the more complex monsters to run with melee, ranged, and special-case attacks, 2 or 3 movement types, spellcasting in some editions, and they are supposed to be smarter than most player characters.If any creature in the game deserves a special manual, it's the dragon. If any particular type of dragon deserves to be covered in there, then it's certainly the evil ones as they tend to be the majority of the draconic opposition in a campaign and this book covers them excellently.

Gaming Fiction Review: The Orc King

Today I'm reviewing R.A. Salvatore's The Orc King, published in 2007, and Book 1 of his most recent Drizzt Trilogy, Salvatore has been writing about this same group of characters, a group of adventuring types living in the Forgotten Realms, since 1988 and the stories fill about 20 books so far. This trilogy is supposed to cover the 100 year timeline jump between 3E Realms and 4E Realms and since the main character is an Elf, there should be no consistency problems in doing this. I have read all of the Drizzt novels over the years and though there are those who will disagree I consider Salvatore to be about the best writer of D&D novels working today - more on that later.

To the book: There is a framing device used here where Drizzt and another elf are discussing the events in the novel 100 years after they occur. I thought this was appropriate and will hopefully set the tone for the remaining books in the trilogy. The book opens very shortly after the end of the previous novel (2004's "The Two Swords") with dwarf king Bruenor dealing with an orc army camped at his front door for the winter. Drizzt, Wulfgar, Regis, Cattie-Brie, and other supporting characters remain close at hand though each is considering following up on their own urges during the winter lull. Bruenor ends up looking for the lost city of Gauntlgrym, Wulfgar goes off to pursue his own interests, but otherwise things stay pretty stable through the first half of the book. Partway through the story intrigue n the orc camp really takes off and provides most of the driving action and plot complications in the book.

Characters: Drizzt is the main character and is at the center of about half of the action. He is the usual combination of wise councilor and ass-kicking champion (sort of a combination of Merlin and Lancelot) with thoughtful commentary between major sections of the book. It's not new but it is consistent and does help the reader pick back up on the feel of these books after a multi-year gap.
Bruenor takes a major role through a large part of the story and does have some interesting decisions to make. He remains the stereotypical dwarf in many ways and has a lot of fighting to do at the end.
Cattie-Brie is sort of a victim through the first part of the story, mostly following around other characters, suffering from an injury sustained in the earlier books and not really making decisions on her own. Late in the plot though a new channel opens up for her which could be interesting in the next 2 books.
Wulfgar is given an interesting path to follow, one that has little to do with the rest of the story in this book. His chapters are mainly about him and are largely separate from the main story and the rest of the characters. There is some very adult material here - not in the X-Rated sense but in the grown-up sense - and it is interesting in some ways, it might have been better off as a separate novel that told a complete story rather than as a few chapters of "Wulfgar goes off by himself to tie up some loose ends and find his destiny."
Regis has next to nothing to do in this one, so if you like the halfling don;t expect to see much of him. He's not a major character this time.
The previous trilogy centered around the rise of an orc king named Obould Many-Arrows and even spent some time telling the story from his point of view. This was one of the more interesting aspects of those books as it's unusual to get to see through the eyes of the orcs in a D&D novel/ Plus, this orc was the Chosen of Gruumsh, and after so many Elminster appearances in novels as the Chosen of Mystra it was incredibly refreshing to see that there are Chosen of other gods too, and that it does mean something. We do get to see more of Obould in this novel and much of the plot centers around what will he do next, but it's not as extensive an in-character view as we had before.
There are other supporting characters including various orc chieftains, orc shamans, another Drow, the usual lineup of dwarves, and a new villain who makes his first appearance in this novel and only this last one, the opponent,  feels off in any way.

Plot: The plot centers around the uncertainty of King Obould Many-Arrows next move as winter thaws and the campaigning season begins. There are factions within the orc forces, some hidden and some more obvious. The dwarves have different options open to them. Other settlements in the north have opinions - Silverymoon, the Moonwood Elves, Nesme, all have to decide how they intend to react. In between this larger political storyline the characters do their things until it all comes to a head at the end. I thought things were headed a certain way at the climax and I was wrong, somewhat disappointingly so.

Disappointments: I have had two problems with Salvatore's work in the past and both of them crop up again here, in addition ot one new issue I see and hope does not become a trend: Spoilers Ahead!

Issue #1: The reset button - like a bad episode of Star Trek The Next generation the books often have interesting potentially world-changing events looming overhead, only to be resolved with no real change to the world by the end of the book/episode. Things at the end of the book tend to be about the same as they were at the beginning of the book with much of the actual change taking place between novels.  Many books back Drizzt fights his arch-rival Atermis Entreri after much build-up. What happens? It's a draw, both survive. Drow take over one of Amn's major cities and ehat happens? Nothing, it's largely secret. The drow attack Mithril Hall and what happens in the end? The dwarves drive them off. The orc king attacks Mithril Hall and what happens? The Dwarves drive them off. Drizzt fights the Orc King, a confrontation between two unstoppable forces and what happens? It's a draw, both survive with no real injuries and go back to their bases. In this novel, has Bruenor found Gauntlgrym? No. Bruenor and some of his closest advisers head out on a suicide mission to take down Obould and anvils are dropped repeatedly that no one is coming back from this, Bruenor in particular,  but guess what? Not only does Bruenor not die, neither does any other dwarf that sets out with him! Everyone is fine! The king suffers a broken arm but that's it! In the end a treaty is signed between the orcs and the dwarfs that leaves things pretty much the same as they were at the start. There's plenty of talk about change and accepting new things but effectively the situation at both ends of the novel is that dwarves and orcs are camped next door to each other and mostly not trying to kill each other.

Issue #2: Major characters are not allowed to die - This ties in somewhat to the gripe above but I think of it as a distinct issue. Out of 6 or so major characters in any given novel, only one has died (Wulfgar) and he came back in the next couple of books. Even major villains can't die - Entreri, Jarlaxle, Obould - all have faced Drizzt and none of them have dies, for some reason. In this novel, much foreshadowing points to Bruenor not making it out of the climactic fight - even Bruenor says it - and this would have been a great way to send off a good character but no! Once again we are denied a heroic end as he somehow survives with only minor injuries. Even secondary characters cannot die - Thibbledorf Pwent is a dwarven battlerage who regularly hurls himself into or onto major foes and even he doesn't get a heroic death! He comes through every battle in great shape. We end up with irresistible forces bouncing off of immovable objects in a literary version of bumper cars! We've had 20 years and 20 novels of these characters - PLEASE LET SOME OF THEM GO!

Issue #3: The one-shot villain - I saw some of this in the previous trilogy with the Drow advisers who met a bad end. In this book we have two - a new orc chieftain who comes up from the underdark and a gnomish wizard of all things, who ends up being a major threat. I was OK with the orc rival to Obould - some factioning among orc tribes is almost required - but the gnome just comes out of nowhere with no real motivation other than a desire to jack with people and appears to have been added to give Drizzt something to kill that appears as a credible threat! It's sloppy and doesn't really fit the rest of the novel. I think the story would have been much better without the interloping evil gnome. Do orc shamans really need help scheming and plotting? If so couldn't it have been a devil or something, maybe showing a religious schism and that not all of them are looking to Gruumsh in their search for power? Couldn't the big uber-orcs from the underdark have brought something along to deal with flying surface elves rather then benefiting from an unknown wizard hidden in their midst? It just sticks out like a sore thumb, feels very random (an evil surface gnome acting as the secret power behind an orc tribe in the underdark?) and doesn't even tie into any past opponents from earlier novels - surely there are enough of them at this point to work in revenge from a prior enemy. This is the first time it's really stuck out for me in reading these books, and I hope it''s not something that continues.

So you might think I hated the book overall after reading the issues listed above, but I didn't - I like it. It does have some problems but it's several cuts above most D&D novels and it does serve as the next chapter in a book that we've been reading for a very long time. If you like these books, this is one of the better ones. If you hate the Realms, D&D books, Drizzt, or gaming fiction in general than this book isn't likely to change your mind but it's not a terrible book by any means. One caveat - this is not a good place to start. Much of it's impact depends on knowing how much the characters have gone through to get to this point and without that background it's going to lose some power.

On a final note Salvatore has grown considerably as a writer over the years. There is one exchange in the book that really struck me as grown-up writing. Drizzt and Cattie Brie are discussing the death of an elf they knew and she asks Drizzt if he would have married her after C-B's death. He's uncomfortable with this and doesn't really want to talk about it but she continues and asks him if he thinks that the elf thought about him in her last moments. There's more to the conversation, and it doesn't really have anything to do with plot but it does come across as very real, something a woman would ask a man and it's just flat-out well-done. Women characters in most gaming fiction don't really come across as being much different from men unless it's as caricatures but this series and this book in particular is better.

So there you go - if you like these kinds of books then it's on the high-end of things. If you hate them then continue and skip past this one. I liked it enough to seek out the next two books in the trilogy and see where it goes. I'll let you know down the road.

Motivational Monday

Roles Through the Editions - Magic-Users

In a weird way, magic-users have changed the least throughout the various editions of D&D in a party role sense, even though they have seen major mechanical changes in the last few editions. In AD&D mages were always the least effective physical combatants with the poorest weapon choices, no armor choices at all, poor to-hit chances, and a d4 for hit points. They also had the unfortunate combination of being the weakest class at low levels and the toughest progression chart, requiring twice as many XP's to advance as a thief at low levels. This weakness has remained basically true through all editions being hard-wired into OD&D, Basic D&D, 1E, and 2E. In 3rd edition there were ways to change this with feats, multiclassing, and prestige classes although the default was basically the same as before. With 4th edition the choices for weapons and armor and the hit point amounts are still weaker than most other classes but it's not as drastic as before.

Abilty-wise Intelligence has always been the king for wizards. In early editions it determined your maximum spell level - not that it mattered until you were in double-digit levels - and extra languages but that was it. It wasn't exactly a power-stat. Dexterity was usually 2nd choice - have to get that AC up somehow! Plus it helped with those thrown daggers and darts used so much at low levels. Some chose Constitution as 2nd but I never saw that as giving great results. When you only have an extra 5- 10 hit points by 5th level it's basically 1 extra hit from a typical weapon or creature. If you were going to be running around with an AC of 9 or 10 it just wasn't enough - Dex always seemed like a better bet.

The biggest complaint regarding M-U's in 1st edition was the limited number of spells at low levels. It is a problem - no one likes getting all prepped and equipped and only getting to do their thing once or twice in a whole day. Before and after that it was all about the knife-throwing (or dart throwing) with the occasional toss of the flaming oil flask. That's really not what a lot of people are thinking of when they think "wizard". Combining this with the extreme fragility of low AC & low hit points, and you had the potential for frequent unhappiness.

One solution was house-ruling and a popular option was to have a high Int grant bonus spells in the same way that a high Wisdom did. I don't have a huge problem with this - it certainly makes the M-U better as almost all of them are going to have a 16+ Int which gives 2 extra 1st's and 2 extra 2nd's, a considerable difference.

One official solution was to add "Cantrips" - a sort of 0-level spell list that could replace a 1st level spell on a 3 or 4 to 1 basis. It was interesting, but I'll be blunt - they sucked. All the low-level mages wanted to do was be better in combat and cantrips were almost universally non-combat magic - lights, changing the color of a piece of clothing, cleaning a pair of shoes, minor lights, etc - absolutely no help in combat for damage, buffs, or any kind of help at all. This was a failed solution.

In my experience the best way to make a low-level 1E magic-user more effective is to get them some treasure - a few scrolls of things like Knock or Wizard Lock let them tap into some of that versatility without reducing their combat ability. A wand of magic missiles was a huge find as now the M-U could contribute every round. The best thing was that all of these were expendable and so self-limiting to a degree - more controllable than adding a +3 Sword to a Fighter in the party or a Mace of Disruption to the Cleric.


Second edition came along and added non-weapon proficiencies. this gave wizards some of the lore skills that their literary and cinematic counterparts often displayed. It was good but made no difference as far as combat though it did make them more "wizardy". Spells and magic items really didn't change, nor did spell-progression. One new wrinkle was the "Kit", kind of a customization to the character that flavored the class in a specific way. One option was the Militant Wizard, allowing one to trade a spell school or three for the ability to become proficient in some additional weapons. The Militant Wiz also capped out at 7th level spells, which rendered this too much of a compromise for many players.

The single biggest change for 2E though was the Specialist Wizard.This allowed a player to trade a more limited spell selection for the ability to cast an additional spell at each spell level as it became available. This was a pretty good option used by about half of the Wizard players in the campaigns I saw. It didn't help in the combat ability department but it did make a big difference in spellcasting,

So 3rd edition comes along and adds skills and feats, better ability score bonuses for lower stats, and a unified experience table. So M-U's are no longer harder to advance, their non-Int stats are more beneficial, and feats allow one to change the traditional poor weapon and armor choices of the mage for something better if the player wants too. Additionally the old house rule of bonus spells for a high Int became official. Wizard players were very happy with 3E as they gained a lot more options and flexibility and really gave up nothing to get it. Scrolls were easier to make, Potions were a breeze, there was a system for making any magic item in fact, many many spells were added and things were good.

The only weakness in all this was that multiclassing a wizard (or really any spellcaster in 3E) was not very effective as armor and level restrictions worked in such a way that casters lost a lot of spellcasting effectiveness when they took multiple classes. Many house rules were developed around this but there was never an official solution that was generally liked and accepted. Looking back I think this was overblown but it was an area where strong passions were involved and many a flamewar erupted over the best way to handle it. I think that weaker multiclassing in return for a better base wizard class is an acceptable tradeoff but not everyone felt the same way at the time.

Alright, so wizards have gotten progressively better and more flexible in each edition. how about 4E? Well, they still play fairly similarly. At low levels a 4E wizard is akin to a 1E wizard with a wand of magic missiles - he can make ranged attacks quite well and look like a wizard while doing it. There are far fewer thrown daggers by 1st lvl wizards in 4E but it's something I can live with. They still have a few weak to strong abilities they can fire off a limited number of times per day and they grow rapidly in power as they level up. The mechanics of how these abilities function have changed dramatically but the wizard is still the lightly-armored guy with weak hit points who stays at the back of the party and blasts things while throwing out the occasional illusion, summoning, buffing spell, de-buffing spell, or movement enhancer. They still like wands and staves. So aside from the mechanics change that affected everyone, wizards end up playing very much like they have in every edition. They have specialized a bit into wizards, warlocks, sorcerers, invokers, and now mages, they are still recognizable as the guys in the pointy hats I won't make a pronouncement as to the general happiness levels of wizard players with 4E given my limited experience at this point, but they do work quite a bit like the old ones in combat and there are a lot of options out there for the interested player. I will say this - if you liked magic-users in old editions and have been leery of 4E then if you get a chance to play I would say try a 4E wizard. That should tell you all you need to know.