Celebrating 40 Years of D&D (or 35)

So here we are 2014.

So far it is cold (-6 outside as I write this).  But it is also something of a banner year. It is the 40th Anniversary of the Dungeons and Dragons game.  The original D&D game, the one hand assembled by Gary and family came out in 1974, but exactly when did it do that?

Well Jon Peterson over at Playing at the World has some pretty good ideas.
http://playingattheworld.blogspot.com/2013/12/when-dungeons-dragons-turns-40.html

With some pains taking research and the skill of an archaeologist he has unearthed a number of artifacts from the time between June 1973 and July 1975 to narrow down the exact date.

I did not start playing then.  My start was a little later. Again, hard to pin it down exactly but I have always said December of 1979.  That is the first time I read over the Monster Manual and played a game of D&D during recess consisting of the MM and a bad 7th generation Xerox of Holmes.  I would not get my own copy of the rules till later, but it is the Dec. 79 date that sticks with me.

We have quite a lot to look forward to really.  D&D 5th edition will be out this summer.  You can now go to your FLGS (and many Barnes & Nobles) and buy pretty much any edition of D&D you want.  DNDClassics.com has gobs of PDFs. Plus there are still plenty of retro-clones, near-clones, what-if clones, Castles & Crusades and Pathfinder.

I am sure there will be plenty of reflections on D&D over the next year leading up to Gen Con; we are a nostalgia soaked bunch really.  But that is fine. Spending some time reflecting on where we were is not a bad thing. As long as we keep moving forward too.

Mage: The Ascension (Revised) FREE

DriveThruRPG has the PDF of Mage: The Ascension (Revised) free today.

http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/199/Mage-The-Ascension-%28Revised%29?affiliate_id=10748

I always rather enjoyed Mage. I thought it was a great idea and a lot of fun to play as characters with world-breaking powers.   I just hated players getting so caught up in all the stereotypes and not trying anything new with their characters.  Plus some of the Technocracy stuff didn't really make much sense.

In the end I preferred WitchCraft and Mage: The Sorcerers Crusade. But I still enjoy this game a lot.

First Poll

My first poll produces some fairly predictable results:

*D&D (B, 1, 2) or Retro-Clone	56 (70%)
D&D 3.x/Pathfinder	34 (42%)
D&D 4	12 (15%)
D&D 5/Next	5 (6%)

Though what I wanted to get out of this was not just how many people responding played what "generation" of games, but how did they compare.

D&D3/Pathfinder ended up higher than I expected. And I will admit I was surprised that D&D4 even got as many as it did.

Thanks everyone who participated.  I'll be doing so more in the future.

2013 in review / 2014 preview

Seeing lots of year end / new year posts this week and that is always fun.

For myself, I'll keep it brief.

Highlights of 2013
- Eldritch Witchery was published in October and the Witch continued to sell very well.
- I got to play a lot of games this year which is always nice. 3.x and AD&D1 with my boys, the occasional Basic game and I even ran AS&SH.
- I also got to play in ongoing Pathfinder game and an occasional D&D4 game this year.  I am playing the same character (basically) in both games so it gives me the chance to compare and contrast the systems in a way I like. Which I also find fun.
- Got to play some Settlers of Catan again, which I enjoy.

On the other hand I am not sure if I networked as much I as I would have liked and I was slow getting involved with Google+ for the most part.
I did not get as many reviews in this year as I would have liked. Some at DriveThruRPG, a few at Amazon and one or two at RPG.Net.

Looking Ahead to 2014
- I have a few Victorian age supplements coming out which should be a lot of fun.  Not for Ghosts of Albion but for Gaslight.
- I have a big project starting up soon that I'll be talking about a lot here.  Nothing I want to say yet.
- White Dwarf Wednesday will draw to a close in 2014.  I am not planning on replacing it with anything just yet. The above mentioned project will prevent that.
- Looking forward to Gen Con this year and D&D5.  I am not as excited about it as I could be, but I will certainly be buying it.

I might not (still undecided) do the bloghops this year. The April A to Z or the October movie marathon.  I do have posts I could do for A to Z, but April is going to be busy for me and I didn't see the increase in traffic or interaction as I had in the past. Plus it is a lot of work.  A recharge might be in order.

I will be doing some 80s Sword & Sorcery movie marathons though.  Not sure how those will work out, but it could be fun.

Until then, have a safe New Years Eve and here's to a great new 2014!

Warlocks, part 2

Over the past week I had the chance to run an AS&SH game and loved it.  My only request to my players was for someone to play a Warlock character.  That was also really fun.

I have never really considered the warlock much. But I have been thinking a lot about the warlock as a class in D&D of late.  There is a Warlock in Eldritch Witchery. It is a type of Wizard basically. I liken it to "Wizard Grad School" to be honest.  They use the same spells as the witch and gain a few extra powers.

The AS&SH warlock is something more akin to a swordmage.  We see something similar in D&D4 Essentials Hexblade.  In general I liked the D&D4 Warlock.  They were a class that wanted quick access to power and none of the work that Wizards had to do.  That was a fine role-playing excuse, but not something that played out in the rules.  Warlocks gained powers just like the Wizards did and had no more or no less requirements.

The Warlocks in Fantastic Heroes & Witchery are another sort.  It is a chaos aligned wizard and has a lot of the same features really.  It uses the same xp per level tables, same HD and same spell progressions.  The FHW Warlock does gain some power, similar in many ways to my own witch, but at a cost.  On the surface this doesn't make it much different than a wizard, with a different selection of spells.  What makes this class, and really this book, different are the selection of spells (the book has 666) and the additional rules for acquiring magic and casting spells.  Adding this material makes the Warlock a much more interesting character.

The Pact-Bound in Magical Theorems & Dark Pacts is another warlock-like class.  Again the idea here is a class that takes a quick path to power for a price, usually to an other worldly power.

There is a similar one in the pages of the ACKS Player's Companion.

In the 3e era we have a couple of "warlocks".  There is a warlock in the Complete Arcane and the witch in Pathfinder, which always felt more like a warlock to me.

Somewhere at the intersection of all these warlocks is the one I want to play.

These are the features I am looking for:
- spontaneous spellcasting
- same spells as the witch or at least some sort of connection
- pacts with other worldly powers that grant the warlock power
- shortcuts to power, so they should get more spells faster, but maybe fewer as time goes on.
- some idea of corruption. Warlocks should be unnatural and not part of this world anymore.

Going to be playing around with this a lot more in the new year.

Warlocks

Just a quick one, still out and on the road.

What do you all think about warlock classes?

I know of a number of different ones, AS&SH, D&D4 and others.  What are your favorite ones and why?

More on this in a bit.

2013 Game of the Year

2013 was a great year for gaming personally.  I got to try out a lot of old things, which is fun, and had a chance to try out some new games as well.  I got to play a lot of Basic and 1st Ed AD&D with my kids, do a little more with 3e, started both a Pathfinder and 4e game.  The Pathfinder game kicks up again next year and I just got a notification about my 4e game just two days ago (on Tuesday, so I guess this post was premature).

But of all the games I tried out only one really grabbed me this year.
Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea.

Today we played a very Howard inspired "rescue the princess before the Old God is awakened" sort of deal.  It was fun and I borrowed a lot from Spellcraft & Swordplay and Call of Cthulhu for this one.
We had an Atlantean warlock, a Keltic Bard, Kimmerian fighter and a "Norse" Cleric.  It was a lot of fun.

For my money it is the best of the "Dark Fantasy" games on the market right now.
I hope I get to play it more in 2014.

If you don't yet have this game then you are really, really missing out on some fun.