Overreaction Wednesday

What if these guys ...

D&D

• "Dead in Thay" is the next big D&D Encounters thing, starting next month. I have two opinions on this:
• They always run Encounters on Wednesday nights. In Texas at least, Wednesday nights involve two popular obligations: divorced parents picking up kids and/or people going to church. Either or both of those can get in the way of spending hours at the game store Wednesday night. Even schools know not to schedule activities on Wednesday nights. I think it's cool that they have a national program that's on a set night all the time - I just wish it was on a different night.
• WOTC doesn't get enough credit for D&D encounters. It's been running for years now, giving people a chance to play in-store at a set time on a set night. If you can find a participating store you know you can play D&D at least once a week whether you have a regular playing group or not. That's a big deal. I don't always like what the company does but I do like that they do this. Even during this time of post-4E-but-not-yet-5E they've kept up a steady stream of Encounters seasons. Not that many companies could do this kind of program, and not all of those who could do. Thanks WOTC.
• The once-weekly rules Q&A and other updates on Next have really slowed down. It's about the only steady source of "Next" that we had and now it's a trickle. Ah, well, I was having trouble getting excited about it anyway - this is just one less thing to worry about. 
• The big thing over the weekend was PAX East. The whole Penny Arcade thing has never really done anything for me but their cons have turned into a medium deal and this one had some D&D news. There's a forum thread at EN World about it. It's mainly about the whole "Tyranny of Dragons" thing that's kicking off the new edition. Some people are surprised that WOTC is painting Tiamat as something fresh or as a neglected major villain - she was the big bad in both a big 3.5 adventure (Red Hand of Doom) and WOTC's 4E Adventure Path (Scales of War) - which fits with my view as I think she's showing up way too much, right up there with Orcus. I don't know where it happened but it's started to feel like D&D in general only has about 5 major forces of evil. I'm not kidding, if you look through everything from novels to Encounters to published adventures, almost all of them tie in some way into one of these:

• Tiamat
• Orcus
• Demogorgon
• Lolth
• The Elemental Princes of Evil  

         Maybe we could spend some quality time with some other major evil with 5E? Jubilex? Gruumsh? Dispater?

... were behind this thing ...

Pathfinder

• Nice long two-part interview with Erik Mona here about Pathfinder and D&D
• Preview of Inner Sea Gods here. I'll gush a bit about Paizo's campaign setting: It's been years since I got excited about Yet Another Published Campaign Setting - especially a fantasy one. I think Scarred Lands was the last one that wound me up anywhere close to this and that was over ten years ago. Golarion feels like a world meant to be used in a game, not admired from afar or buried in pointless trivia. I expect this book to continue the excellence and I am looking forward to it.
• An interview with Paizo's James Jacobs here that spends a lot of time on Adventure Paths in general, Iron Gods more specifically, and mixing technology into fantasy in particular. Putting something like Iron Gods out as a full adventure path and not just as a one-off adventure module, is an example of the kind of things I like about Paizo.

... and these guys had to stop it?

Supers

• Plot Points is doing a new adventure for Marvel Heroic that looks pretty promising
• The ICONS line artist is offering to do some custom work at pretty decent prices here.
• Not a lot of new M&M news the last few weeks but there is a nice bit about the DC Adventures Universe book and the Origins Awards here.
• The M&M bundle of holding is still going on for a few more days here. Still a crazy good deal if you're interested in superhero role playing games.