DC Adventures from Green Ronin Pre-Order

I am very geeked about this.

DC Adventures is now up for Pre-order at Green Ronin's website.

And if you pre-order at their website, or at your FLGS you can get a code to buy the PDF for 5 bucks.

That's not too bad really.
I have seen some of the changes they have made to the system and while I was hoping to see it evolve more towards True20, I am very curious to see how it all works out.

Looking forward to this one and it is one of just a small handful of books on my Gen Con must buy list

I Stand on the Shoulders of Giants

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."
- Isaac Newton (1642-1727) in: Letter to Robert Hooke, February 5, 1676

The giant in this case was Descartes.  Later the same quote would be used to describe Newton himself by Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking. Each generation builds on the work of the last.

Giants are not revered for their size, but because of their ability to see further.

I take a lot of praise for my work and because I am human I enjoy it. Because of who I am I also take it with a bit of surprise.  Afterall I like to write stuff that I like, it amazes me that others might enjoy it too.  But I understand that nothing I, or anyone else does, exists in a vacuum.

Ghosts of Albion would not exist at all had it not been obviously for the creative talents of Christopher Golden and Amber Benson.  It is their world, they define it, shape it and tell us how the characters live in it.  The rules for the game exist because of C.J. Carella.  Not only did he write the Cinematic Unisystem game that Ghosts uses, it was his Classic Unisystem game WitchCraft that inspired me to want write for Eden in the first place. Will Ghosts sell better than WitchCraft? I have no idea. Will people like it more? I know some do, others feel WitchCraft is still the superior game and I will not fault them for that.
Even taking all that into consideration I had help of editors, playtesters and general advice.

My various Witch books are the same way. As are my academic and professional lives.

Standing on the shoulder of giants is not about reverence of people, but rather acknowledgement of their work, of their contributions and why that work has helped make our lives a bit better.

We stand on the shoulders of giants so that one day others may stand on ours.

D&D4 Essentials

So I don't know much yet about this whole D&D Essentials line from Wizards.

At some level it is a marketing ploy.  Getting people to buy more materials.  I can live with that really.  Wizards is a company and they need to make money.  If they can come up ways to make more money I will not fault them. I don't have to buy the product either.  That is the benefit of a free market.

But I like the idea of the new "Basic Set". I am going to be running my two boys through D&D4 soon and they have been playing D&D 3.x for a while now.  They are playing in a Pathfinder game too, so they are not what you would call newbies anymore; but there is a bit of newness about them and this box appeals to me.

I am am concerned about power creep and too many changes from the books I already have.  Will a D&D Essentials Cleric be really different than the one I have in my PHB?  I don't know and neither it seems do others, but the initial posts I am reading seems to confirm that the cleric in either book will be roughly the same, give or take some flavor.

According the the blog Points of Light, I might not need to worry and in fact it looks like some of the changes being made to characters will provide more ways to differentiate the characters more than the same basic power template all characters have.

So, it almost sounds like that we are getting kits (from 2e) for D&D 4.  Something I have always thought would work for the Heroic tier for a while.

Will I be buying all of the D&D4 Essentials line?  Probably not.  I will pick up the starter set (still don't know what the art on that one looks yet) because boxed sets are cool.

4e Purchases

I picked up some new 4e books this weekend that are not due out till July 20th.
Benefits of living near a huge game store.

First Up, Demonicon

An interesting book and I have always liked demons as the ultimate foes in D&D.  Of course I dislike the name, but it has been with us since Module S4 so it's a little late to part with now.  At least it is better than the 2nd Ed era wimp out "Fiendonomicon".  Gah.
The cover, to me anyway, brings up images of Eldritch Wizardry, the first D&D book to feature demons.  The blonde on her back in obvious sacrifice.  These are not misunderstood monsters, these are demons and they are evil.
Lots of demons. Lots of history on the Abyss.
I like the way they have tied in Tharizdun to whole mythos now.  So this will be great when I run S4-WG4 for my kids and they actually find a copy of the Demonomicon of Iggwilv.  I like that Demogorgon, Orcus and Baphomet were once Primordials.  Something I was doing anyway.  I like that there is more for Tharizdun, even though I can see he will also soon get on my nerves if he keeps popping up.    But I always liked him since reading about him the "Gord the Rogue" books by Gary.
There are some cool demonic lairs that can be used on their own or as part of a larger campaign in the Abyss.
Now see this is where not having the PDFs of the books is a real pain.  I would have loved to have had a PDF of this to print out and put in a binder with all the information on the Abyss from The Plane Below and Manual of the Planes, all the information from various Dragon and Dungeon articles, and all the demons from the Monster Manuals all in one place.  Made a complete Demonomicon if you like.  I had started this exact idea for 3.x, though rather late in the game and never got everything printed out.
I dislike the whole "Asmodeus is at the center of all evil plots" idea that has pervaded the last two editions of D&D, but with some of the new information in this book, I have some ideas.  All in all, I like this book, but I expected that I would.  I do have one quibble.  They do list Malcanthet as a demon lord.  Well, she was demon lord of the Succubi in the last edition.  Succubi are no longer demons...

Tomb of Horrors

There are very, very few adventures as notorious as the Tomb of Horrors.  It is also held up to some unrealistic standard for modules that it must be a "good thing" to kill off characters.
Well I am reasonably certain that Tomb of Horrors for 4e will get cries of "blasphemy" and "sacrilege" from certain quarters; but I am also reasonably certain that those quarters were never going to buy this book anyway.
The new adventure is not just one, but 4 Tombs scattered all over the new D&D4 cosmology.  Clever really if you are wanting to introduce what is cool in this new world to players that pick this up remembering the original ToH.
Speaking of the Original Tomb, it is here, in it's abandoned form.  Note: WOTC Guys,  you copied the original Tomb map perfectly, too perfectly in fact.  The scale of the original map was one square = 10 feet.  Scale on the new map is the more common for 4e 1 square = 5 feet.  So our entry hallway is now 10 feet wide instead of 20 feet wide.  Minor quibble, I can explain it away in any number of ways, but still.
There are rules and notes in here about how to play the Tomb just like the old days, but they explain why they didn't design the module like that to start.  All in all it is a neat module and adventure.  It is still a killer module, as in it will kill characters if they are stupid.
I am not going to try to blow any sunshine up your ass, if you love "Tomb of Horrors" and hate D&D 4 you will hate this. If you liked ToH and like D&D 4 then this is nice little "Return to the Return of the Tomb of Horrors".
What I like about it is it assumes that the characters do not live in a vacuum.  The Tomb of Horrors is legendary to players and characters. This module assumes it was cleared out in the 70's and 80's and now the next gen is here to see what is new.  It's the exact same thing I doing with "B3 Palace of the Silver Princess" and the same thing I did with the whole "Road Stories" arc of "Season of the Witch" for my Willow & Tara game.

While reading through them both I can see elements that I will use in my big D&D 4e campaign against Orcus.    Acererak could be allied with Orcus, or more likely Tharizdun.  Though I had not considered Tharizdun to be a huge player in this game.  He is chained up after all.  In fact it has helped me solidify a few ideas.

There is an OSR debate?

So without linking or getting into any details I guess there is some sort of OSR debate going on.  Again.

See here is the thing about this kind of flare-ups.  If you don't hear about it it's like they are not even real.

Here is the OSR news I know and care about.
- I have my copy of "Palace of the Vampire Queen" now.  One more thing off my D&D-bucket list.
- OSR products are getting into some Borders. (by a company that also produces a ton of 4e products)
- I am going to run my kids through "Palace of the Silver Princess" orange version sometime in the next couple of weeks.
- There are some Ennie noms for some OSR-related products.  Good on them!
- There is a "homage/retro-clone" of 2nd Ed coming out.
- Tomb of Horrors for 4th ed is out now at my FLGS.  I am sure that is making someone out there foaming at the mouth in nerd rage.

Outside of that you don't hear anything about this in the stores (in fact you hear nothing) and most players (the ones that buy the products) don't care.

Arguing about it just makes the whole thing seem like an "us vs. them" and usually I find myself on the side of the people making the less noise. Or the ones that irritate me the less.

Personally, I am probably not part of the OSR.  Sure, I play old games, I also play the newest ones and indie games too.  I write for older games...and newer ones and small press. But I also have never bought into the "one-true-way" idea anyway and really neither do most game authors.

In the immortal words of Gary, "shut the fuck up and play." Oh wait, that was my old DM, not Gary.
Might as well burn my OSR membership card now and forget the secret handshake.

Arioch! Arioch! Blood and souls for my Lord Arioch!

Mongoose, a company that I have mixed emotions about (love some of the things they do, abhor others) has put another check in the "love" column for me by re-releasing the Elric!/Stormbringer RPG.  Or rather, releasing it for the first time on PDF.

Like a lot of gamers I read Elric, Corum, Hawkmoon, Count Brass and even the Jerry Cornelius books. I know of the impact Moorcock made on the early days of our hobby.  I loved the RPG books and I always felt it was fitting that they used the same system as Call of Cthulhu rather than D&D.  The odd thing was I never really got to play that much Elric.  Maybe I can change that.

Anyway, here are books.  If you have never played or even read them they are great.  Thank you Mongoose from bringing these back to us.

Michael Moorcock's Elric!

This is the one I have in good ole' dead tree format at home.  This is the one that had the magic system different from the previous editions.














Stormbringer is the version most people played. Mongoose is offering us both the 1st Edition (which is mostly the same as the 2nd and 3rd editions) and the 4th Edition.

This of course makes me wonder if there is a new Elric/Stormbringer game on the horizon.  That would be cool, I just hope it is not like "Dragon Lords of Melniboné".

Oh Dresden Files...

Why must you tempt me so?