It’s been a while since I read a D&D book (almost two years) so I was very surprised by the quality of this supplement. At fist, I though “oh boy, a book about fairies and pixies, rainbows and unicorns, all pink and flowery…” Man, was I wrong! Of course there are pixies and rainbows, Princes of Summer and cities of eternal autumn, but they’re the ones from old Greek and Irish myth — dangerous, deadly, incredibly powerful and not at all impressed with humanity. It’s the kind of fairy tale that reminds you all too well how fragile mortal life is, and how fleeting our achievements are compared to the immortal and godlike beings from beyond the Veil.

I need to give special praise for the layout of this book. Throughout the pages you see leaves, masks, branches and uncut stones decorating the book — a very nice touch that conveys the idea of a book about the Feywild. But the best part are the “Bard’s Tales” sections, side-blocks of stories small and large, conveying the most interesting, strange, and bizarre folklore tales. They not only set the mood at every chapter, section, and page, but also give immense amounts of material to weave into your games if you want to.

The only downside of the book is the lack of DM-related material: the book is 95% for the player, who will have a ball with the new backgrounds, races, and builds — not classes, mind you, but new powers for existing ones, and new builds, which I find brilliant, for there are more than enough character classes out there. I’d give special attention to the very last chapter, where you could create a rich backstory for the entire party at random — a tip of the hat to the old AD&D “Complete” supplements, I think. The three races added to the Dungeons & Dragons mythos (the hamadryad, the pixie and the satyr) are surprisingly interesting and fun. I’d not only allow, but indeed invite at least one character from those races in my table at any time.

If it wasn’t for the lack of love for the Dungeon Master, I’d have given Heroes of the Feywild 4 stars. Let’s hope something in the vein of The Shadowfell: Gloomwrought and Beyond is in the pipeline for the Feywild.

For those who are unfamiliar (and really, the game is free, so you have no excuse) with the character generation system in OSH, it’s pretty simple. The basics are these: choose one of 7 classes, roll your attributes, choose one of 5 talents for your class, choose a weapon, choose some armor. There are some other choices that you make that amount to role-playing hooks, and have little to no impact on mechanics, but that’s basically it. At first blush, this seems limiting. A level 1 goblin isn’t going to look that different from another level 1 goblin, mechanically; that much is true. But there’s more there than is immediately apparent.

First of all, you can’t have two players with the same class. I actually like this limitation quite a bit, as it does allow for a lot more differentiation between PCs. The real genius is in how open-ended some of the mechanics are. Weapons and armor, for example, are simply generic categories: light armor, heavy armor, light weapon, reach weapon, etc. There are three kinds of armor to choose from, and there are five kinds of weapons. However, you’re encouraged to flavor these choices however you like.

This is an approach I really like: generic mechanics nearly devoid of flavor, so that the players can fill that flavor in, themselves. This is how you wind up with caber-wielding fighters and clerics who use their holy book as their primary weapon. It’s great fun, and leads to a lot of great role-playing situations (like when, isntead of using a torch, the party lit the figher’s caber on fire, which remained on fire for the rest of the session).

Another area where the minimalist approach works is in covering different situations. OSH does not try to come up with rules to cover every situation; it has a few simple rules that can be applied broadly, and some guidelines for coming up with rules for improvised actions. Players, when given this kind of freedom, tend to come up with crazy stuff. Rather than saying, “I attack the kobold”, you get, “I throw my caber at the kobold; after it hits him it ricochets off the wall and rolls back in front of my feet”.

This is reinforced by another simple yet elegant mechanic: awesome points. There’s a bowl of these in the middle of the table; players can reward each other awesome points from the bowl whenever another player does something they think is awesome. They can then spend those awesome points to do more awesome stuff. That’s pretty much it; specifics are not discussed. Instead, it’s left up to the players and the DM to determine what falls under the umbrealla of “awesome”.

Old School Hack is a very simple, streamlined, rules-light game. The whole thing is maybe thirty pages long. It never felt like there weren’t enough rules to handle things, though. And it always felt like people were using their mastery of the rules (which came quickly) to do all kinds of fantastic and interesting things. This is an approach to game design that I have grown to appreciate quite a bit.

Thing the first: The Awesome Die. The core of this idea was originally posited to me by frequent commenter mbeacom. I’m simplifying it a little bit here. I bought an Awesome Die (a d30) at GenCon, specifically so I could use this trick. The idea is, whenever a player does something really awesome at your table, that player can roll the Awesome Die instead of a plain old d20. Obviously, this works best with games that use a d20, like D&D. A couple of implications go along with using a d30 rather than a d20. First, success is considerably more probable; this is the intent. You want to encourage awesome things at your table, and making those awesome things more likely to succeed will do that. Another implication is that, if it’s an awesome attack, it’s much more likely to crit, since you can roll a natural 20-30 on this die. Assuming 4e D&D, your crit chance jumps from 5% to around 30% for that attack. That’s significant. As a result, you might want to limit how often you hand out the Awesome Die. This, in turn, will have the effect of players trying harder to get it, in all likelihood, provided you make it clear that it’s available and hand it out at least once early in the session.

Thing the second: How to Host a Dungeon is a fantastic game to read; I haven’t even played it yet, but I totally want to. On its own, it seems like a lot of fun to simulate the life cycle of a dungeon. But wait, there’s more! You can use that dungeon in a game if you want to. In a game like D&D, this can be a lot of work. That’s fine, if you don’t mind the prep, and it’s a great way to get a convincing dungeon with a lot of backstory for your game. But if you want to dive right into the dungeon with little to no prep, there’s another game you can use . . .

Thing the third: Old School Hack. I heard about this game at GenCon (it won an ENnie, even), and it is indeed awesome. OSH is an indie game inspired by the original D&D Red Box, but with much simpler and more modern rules that encourage a lot of crazy, off-the-wall actions and cool character concepts. It’s also free. And elf is a class. Awesome. At any rate, it goes with How to Host a Dungeon extremely well, so much so that I’m going to print it out on card stock and drop it in the same folder as HTHAD, and basically treat them as two linked games. I can’t wait to make a dungeon, then run some unsuspecting party through it. It’s going to rock.

That was the only game I played. I did, however, go to the IPR booth and pick up a copy of Dread (a horror game that uses a Jenga tower as its primary resolution mechanic). There I ran into Amanda and Clark Valentine (Amanda edited Bulldogs!), and we got to talking (about games). Tracy Hurley (Sarah Darkmagic), Thadeus C., and Tracy Barnett (Troll in the Corner) also stopped by, and we had a nice conversation.

Shortly after I went to the airport, where I started killing time by reading some of my games.

Zombie Cinema is short to read (took 15 minutes or so, all told), but it seems like it’ll be a lot of fun, especially as a zero-prep pick-up game. How to Host a Dungeon looks like a great one-player game, and I have a hunch it’ll go well with a game that I heard about today called Old School Hack, which I’m going to research tomorrow. I’m halfway through Mortal Coil, and every freaking page is giving me ideas. It’s great.

So now GenCon is over, and I’m a little sad. Still, it’s nice to be back home, and it’s not like I won’t be gaming. I’ve got D&D Encounters this Wednesday (new season, new character), and I’m also planning on running at least one demo of Bulldogs! at my FLGS. I may run some other indie games, just to get a chance to play them. Huzzah!

The first, and arguably the better of the two, is Magic: The Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012. I played the first Duels game and liked it quite a bit. The second surpasses the first in just about every way. There are more decks available (and some of them are just plain awesome), lots of unlocks to get, and three separate campaigns to play. One of them, the Revenge campaign, is just a harder version of the main campaign, where your enemies have better cards available. The third, though, is the Archenemy campaign, which allows you to play with a whole new, cooperative style of Magic. In addition to the campaigns, you can also play custom games. I haven’t experimented with that yet, but I would imagine that’s where a lot of my time will go once I’m done with the campaigns. If you like M:TG, I highly recommend this game; it’s only $10.

The second is Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale, an awkward name if ever there was one. This is not what I’d call a particularly good game. The graphics are ugly, the gameplay is repetitive, there are a number of bugs and balance issues (the most glaring of which is that the rogue kills more stuff and therefore levels up faster than anyone else), there’s no real voice work to speak of (the NPCs talk with text boxes accompanied by grunts). Despite all this, I’m having a great time playing it with my friend Mike, and I’m enjoying it for what it is: stupid, cheap fun. So, while I can’t really recommend the game, if you have friends keen on playing it, there are worse ways to spend $15.