Sunday, October 26, 2014

Dragonborn in Greyhawk

When 5th edition came out I decided to restart an old Greyhawk campaign that I had run in 2005. Several new races were included in 5th edition that weren't in older products. Dragonborn aren't included in the overwhelming number of Greyhawk products. So I Googled Dragonborn and came up with a few ideas for including them in the campaign. These are some of my notes. I used Player's Handbook Races – Dragonborn as a inspiration as well as Dragon Magazine. Skip Williams published a Greyhawk map of a continent on the other side of Oerth and the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer notes that Oerth has four continents. I decided that dragonborn originated from the other continent. Its basically a blank slat for DMs to work with. One of the countries on the map was Lynn. Lynn was founded on the ruins of ancient Arkhoisa three hundred hundred years ago. It has lived in relative piece since then. When the empire of Arkhoisa flew in the turmoil several hundred dragonborn sailed across the vast Solnor Ocean in search of new lands. Here they found the human and demihuman races of the Flanness. Once settled they multiplied and moved across the Flanness. Over time other dragonborn migrated to the Flanness as well. The dragonborn have prospered in the Flanness working their powerful magic or hiring themselves out as mercenaries. They are as diverse as the dragons that spawned them ages ago. The descendants of blue dragons have found work with Rary in the Bright desert while white blooded dragons fight alongside Suel mercenaries in the Northern reaches of the Flanness. These are just a few of my ideas for fitting dragonborn into Greyhawk. Any thoughts?

Thursday, July 31, 2014

Chhanges....to Organized Play

D&D Adventurers League Player's Guide: a review

Today Wizards of the Coast released the new 21 page guide to organized play: D&D Adventurers League Player's Guide. . The new guide is designed to be the starting point for new Wizards of the Coast organized play campaigns. Earlier this year Wizards announced that they were doing away with their traditional organized play structure namely the RPGA, which stood for the Role Playing Game Association which was started in 1980 by Frank Mentzer. Going forward Wizards has broken down organized play into three parts, Encounters (their traditional weekly store based games) D&D Expeditions (convention based scenario play) and D&D Epics (large multi table events exclusive to large conventions such as GenCon) The guide outlines in three parts, Characters, the campaign and other information for game play. Part one - characters contains the biggest surprise. Evil characters are now allowed to be played. This might come as a shock to some long time members of the organized play community. Since the first organized play campaign Living City was started in 1987, evil characters have not been allowed. This was continued in Wizards 3rd edition campaign Living Greyhawk, D&D Campaigns like Xen'drik Expeditions and the Pazio Pathfinder supported campaign Pathfinder Society. Both of which are/were highly popular campaigns. Some might say that evil characters can be disruptive to game play. In the rules for the campaign Wizards has included some of the rules for infractions which used to exist under the old RPGA. It allows for the DM to control problem players at the table. The Forgotten Realms and the area of the Moonsea in particular, is the focus of the campaign. The guide also outlines the new faction system borrowed from Pathfinder Society. Joining factions such as the Zhentarim and the Harpers allow players to have additional in game motivations apart from successful conclusion of the adventure. But with evil characters allowed I imagine that Wizards has decided to take a bold, and some might say controversial step in Organized Play.

EDIT: Apparently evil PCs were allowed at some point during Encounters. But I have never played Encounters.

If you want to continue the discussion my Twitter ID is qstor2. Thanks!

Monday, June 2, 2014

Setting the Stage

Wizards of the Coast recently announced the schedule for releases for the new edition of Dungeons and Dragons with much fanfare. In early April Chris Perkins one of the designers for the new edition announced at PAX East that there would be Eberron support and in an article in Forbes it was announced that Ravenloft would receive support. Although at this point I'm not sure if its beyond a new board game. Perennial favorite the Forgotten Realms is also receiving strong support and is the focal point of the new Organized Play campaign as it was for 4th edition.

Mike Mearls another designer of the new edition has gone out of his way to make sure that the new edition is simple, easily convertible from past editions and embraces core elements of the old editions like Vancian Magic. But one step that Wizards of the Coast can take to wholly embrace fans of older editions is to publish editions of old D&D settings too. As much as I'd like to see an edition of Greyhawk. I think that's unlikely for a variety of reasons. Some of the other settings more likely are:

1. Dragonlance : Kender were in the play test editions and creator Margaret Weis has expressed some interest on Twitter in having a new edition of the Dragonlance published setting using the new rules for D&D.

2. Planescape – a setting that was overlooked in 3rd and 4th editions and has a lot of hardcore fans. Plancescape writers such as Colin McComb and Monte Cooke have moved onto other work but perhaps a new generation of writers can pick up were they left off.

3. Mystara – Wizards of the Coast refused to license this setting when author and ex TSR employee Bruce Heard announced plans to do a Kickstarter based on his stories in Dragon magazine. Perhaps the beloved Basic D&D setting will be revlived in the new edition of Dungeons and Dragons?

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