My buddy Dean just posted this really interesting explanation of how Viking culture can be applied to the ‘points of light’ model that I discussed earlier. Some of this I’m not sure I can reconcile with what I have in place right now (such as it is), but other things intrigue me.

The idea of “Sea Kings” (or, in Wild Blue’s case, “Sky Kings”) is a good one. I like the idea that, while the Demesne is the major power, there may be a number of nomadic pirate lords, or even warlords in control of entire city-states, outside the purview of either the Demesne or the Folk. This could even feed into the concept of one people selling high-quality weapons to another, only to have them used against them somewhere else. Perhaps some of the border towns manufacture high-end swords or guns, sell them to a neighboring city-state in order to appease their warlord, and said warlord sends out pirate ships to raid the Demesne’s merchant vessels. Along these same lines, Dean inquired about the relationship between the Demesne and the Folk, and whether or not it would be conducive to trade in border areas. The answer is, probably not. The issue isn’t necessarily one of animosity (though there’s no shortage of that), but of the fundamental differences between the two peoples. The people of the Demesne are human. The Folk are very much not. Many of them are ageless, a number of them have vast amounts of power at their disposal, and they are almost universally inscrutable and unknowable by human beings. They are the Other, in every aspect of the term. Some trade might be possible on an individual basis, but such trade would likely make no sense to humans, with the Folk offering bits of worthless junk (toadstools, bits of string) for valuable tools, or vice versa.

This threw me for a loop last night. Apparently, Saga has been deemed one of the top five free RPGs by Associated Content. Cool.

Recently I read an article in the electronic version of Dungeon Magazine that talked about a new philosophy present in 4th Edition: Points of Light. This is not a mechanical idea, but an idea that affects story and theme. It goes like this: the world is a dark place. Civilization is comprised of tiny settlements and the occasional large city, mostly isolated from each other and separated by vast expanses of wilderness. They are, effectively, points of light in a sea of darkness. This philosophy is present, they say, to provide more opportunities for adventure, and to make creating your own setting, one point at a time, easier.

It’s an idea that speaks to me, largely because I’m using a similar philosophy in Wild Blue. The Demasne is a new territory, and most of it is unsettled. The capital, Bastion, is a sprawling metropolis, a point of light that burns particularly brightly. There are a few other smallish cities, as well, but most settlements are villages, towns, hamlets, isolated from all but their closest neighbors. The presence of the Folk, a mysterious and frightening race of beings, enhances the feeling of isolation, because a trip through the wilderness is that much more dangerous. The only reasonably safe ways to get from place to place are with a merchant caravan (strength in numbers) or on a skyship (fast, and high above most of the danger).

Wow, it has been a long time since I’ve posted, hasn’t it. Alright, a quick update as far as thing that you can look forward to seeing on my site in the near future.

1. HeroCard Orc Wars: TableStar sent me the Ranger and Sorceress expansion packs a little while back so I could more thoroughly review the multiplayer aspects of the game. I’m going to do this, but I just moved to a new area about a month ago, and I don’t know very many gamers in the area. I’m going to try to get something going in the next few weeks, and if I can, this will be on the menu. Suffice it to say, the artwork is just as good on these cards as in the core game, and I’m excited to try it out.

2. HeroCard Nightmare: TableStar also sent me this game for review. This will happen, with the same provisos as above: time, location, et cetera. The mechanics in this one look interesting, and it’ll be neat to see how the card battle system interacts with the deduction mechanic at the core of the game.

3. Three-Dragon Ante: I just picked this up a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve played a couple of two-player games with my wife and really enjoyed them (though I lost both times). I’m anxious to get a larger game going, as it supports up to six players.

4. Wild Blue: Things are still progressing here. I have some mechanics ideas that I really want to fiddle around with before I put too much of the setting on paper, but I’m still pretty excited about this project, and I fully intend for it to see the light of day. I may ask if people want to do some playtesting sometime down the road, but that’s a bit premature at the moment.

Some interesting information has been posted about wizards in 4th Edition. This article makes me think a little bit of the magister and mage blade classes from Monte Cook’s Arcana Unearthed, a game that I liked a lot, and I like this direction. A wizard’s spellbook always seemed like so much wasted potential. The idea of a focus item that a wizard relies on, something that facilitates her arcane prowess, is an idea I’m fond of, but the 3E spellbook turned out to be additional book-keeping with little payoff. Sure, a wizard can scribe spells to his spellbook, making him very versatile and increasing the value of found scrolls, but that’s really the only advantage of the thing, and it proves a significant limiting factor on the number of spells he can have available to him, when such rules are enforced at all.

Now, I’m not trying to imply that spellbooks are going away. I doubt they are; they are so intrinsic to the idea of wizard in D&D that I can’t see the designers extricating the one from the other. However, this idea that wizards use orbs, staves, and wands to focus their magic is intriguing in its implications. Further, wizards have divergent traditions. One thinks of rules in the eventual 4E Eberron book that provides new wizardly traditions, perhaps complete with new wizardly implements, specific to that realm. Perhaps there will be something fundamental to differentiate a wizard devotee of the Silver Flame from an Emerald Claw necromancer, or even an Emerald Claw necromancer from an Aereni necromancer. One thinks of Aereni necromancers brandishing ancestral skulls adorned with gold and jewels, while those of the Emerald Claw fling magical vitriol from wands made of the finger-bones of their enemies. Chilling.

Ok, two things have been dominating my geek radar currently. Really, three things if you count 4th Edition, but the initial excitement has passed and my geek-out-itude about 4E has subsided into a general ambient hum of anticipation.

Monte Cook’s World of Darkness: I’m currently about halfway through this book, and I have mixed feelings veering more toward positive than negative. I’ll start with the negative and move on to the positive. First, the mechanics are seemingly designed to be compatible with 3.5, presumably so that you can use Monster Manual N to introduce all kinds of weirdness to the game. Granted, the “class/race” system is different and there are some interesting elements to the mechanical side of things, but a lot of the book seems sort of conservative for Mr. Cook. I expected more interesting things to be done with skills and feats, particularly after books like Arcana Unearthed and Iron Heroes (though the latter was, admittedly, designed primarily by Mike Mearls and not by Monte Cook). Skills and feats are more-or-less as they appear in D&D (with a few additions to account for the modern setting), and supernatural powers, while interesting in some cases, some to be mechanically sort of “blah”. One big caveat about this statement: I’ve only just now started reading about the magic system, and it seems pretty good. In fact, so far it seems like the magic system that should have been in Iron Heroes. I haven’t read anything about equipment, the changes to combat and such, or enemies, so there is a lot that I’m not yet qualified to comment on.

That said, there’s a lot to recommend in this book. Mechanically, the concept of “types” as a combination of race and class, combined with a “focus” to grant you skills purchasable at reduced cost each level is kind of cool. Some of the supernatural powers are also quite cool, especially demonic cants. The primary thing to recommend this book, though, is the setting. It is, in a word, awesome. A warning, though, to World of Darkness purists who think that the new line of WoD products is too much of a departure from canon: this is not the World of Darkness you’re used to. There are superficial similarities. There are vampires, werewolves, demons, and mages. Vampires are organized into clans and can get disciplines to grant them supernatural abilities. Mages cast spells. Werewolves rip things to shit. Most of the similarities end there. None of the supernatural creatures have a society that has existed on earth for thousands of years. In fact, vampires, werewolves, and demons have only existed on Earth for a single year.

See, a year ago these inscrutable, extraplanar beings called the Iconnu tried to destroy are reality and failed. Something about certain people (the Awakened) held our reality together, but the side effect of the Iconnu’s attack was an event called the Intrusion, accompanied by the Nightmare Wave. Strange things started appearing all over the place, and a large chunk the middle of the US was simply destroyed. The Iconnu knew that something had gone wrong, so they created servants to help correct the problem (the problem being us). They summoned the long-dead souls of evil human beings, which possessed living human beings to become vampires, creatures with two souls vying for dominance of one body, and a constant thirst for blood. They summoned feral spirits of rage from another dimension; these spirits also possessed human bodies to become werewolves, creatures of alien rage and violence. Finally, they summoned ancient beings of cosmic malevolence, who created bodies for themselves out of Earthly materials that they could shape at will. These beings are known as demons, and they are the physical incarnations of the Nightmare Wave in more ways than one. The fabric of reality was also screwed up a bit, which allowed certain people to become mages and work real magic with ages-old rituals. Finally, there are the Awakened: humans who hold reality together on an unconscious level, and who are blessed (or cursed) with the ability and resolve to detect and destroy supernatural beings.

So, pretty different, right? What I like about this approach is that the different types allow for very interesting roleplaying opportunities. Vampires are cool to play because you get to effectively make up two personalities for your character, one of which is evil. Werewolves are interesting because you get to play a sort of “stranger in a strange land” character who just wants to destroy everything in sight, but knows that doing so would be pretty stupid, from a survival standpoint. Demons are interesting because they are all irredeemably evil by human standards, and any demonic protagonists will be opposing the Iconnu for their own selfish reasons, and will still be irredeemably evil. Mages are fun because they’re wild cards, and because they’re capable of a wide variety of supernatural effects. The Awakened are necessary from a metaplot standpoint, but exist to sort of be a “default human” character for people who don’t want to be overtly supernatural. The GM gets some fun toys, too. The Nightmare Wave did all kinds of weird things, and effectively gives the GM carte blanche to drop whatever creepiness he wants into the game. It’s all pretty good, in my opinion, and I dig the idea that the apocalypse is happening now.

Bioshock: I’ve been playing this game on my PC for the last week. Again, there’s good and bad, but this time I’m pretty firmly on the side of loving it. The load times are ridiculously long, being a minute or more (though they are, thankfully, infrequent). The game experiences some lock-ups occasionally, simply hanging for fifteen to twenty seconds before starting up again. Not only that, but this game is easily capable of bringing my computer, screaming, to its knees if I play for a long period of time. It’s not without its issues. Despite this, I love this game. It’s easily one of my top five games of all time, it’s that good. I love the nonlinearity, the character development, the engrossing story and atmosphere, the combat, the moments of pure dread when I’m staring down a corridor and can see a splicer’s shadow cast on the opposite wall. The hacking mini-game is fun, and hacking comes with a number of rewards. I love that I’ve learned to scavenge a room from top to bottom once I’ve deemed it safe. It’s really just a fantastic game in every sense of the word, even with the performance issues that I have (and some of these, I suspect, stem from the fact that my laptop is now more than a year old, and that the video card, while still very good, does not get frequent driver updates and cannot make use of nVidia’s Bioshock-optimized drivers, despite being a GeForce card).

Zombies: Are you prepared for the invasion?

I’ve been ravenously devouring every scrap of information I can get my hands on regarding 4th Edition. Wizards’ official site updates three times a week, which hardly seems like often enough. I have, however, managed to catch hold of some inspiring scraps, and I have some suppositions based on others. In no particular order:

• Paladins no longer have to be Lawful Good. It never made sense to me that only the good-aligned deities got divine champions. Wouldn’t a deity like the Mockery or Bane see the sense in having a living conduit of serious beat-down, and imbue someone thus? Now they can.
• I have a hunch that attacks of opportunity are being replaced by immediate actions, which allow you to react to certain stimuli in a variety of ways. I hope to see a number of feats and class abilities that grant you a great deal of flexibility in how you use your immediate actions and what triggers them. I have heard mention of rogues being able to wait for an opening and launch a counter-attack, a maneuver that was, mechanically, difficult to pull of in 3.x.
• Clerics can now heal while they do other things. Huzzah!
• The old, Vancian spell slot system of magic is (mostly) gone apparently, replaced by something that is presumably more balanced for an individual encounter rather than a full day. Also, you can have 25th-level spells (though I’m unclear as to why spell levels don’t go all the way up to 30, like class levels). Further, fighter/mage hybrid characters will apparently be far more viable at lower levels.
• Along those lines, the multiclassing system is evidently seeing a bit of a re-haul.
• Iterative attacks are, I believe, being eliminated or, at the very least, minimized in a Saga-esque way, which should speed up combat, particularly at higher levels.
• Fighters are weapon specialists now, and rogues are skill specialists. Fighters can do more with weapons than other classes can, and rogues can do more with skills.
• The designers are trying to design the classes such that everyone always has something interesting to do. By extension, this implies more options for the fighter (rather than merely, “I attack the orc.”) and less “Crap, I’m out of spells” for the wizard/cleric/sorcerer.

That’s all I can think of right now. The geeky part of my brain has been set a-tingling.

I’m sure most of you already know, but it was officially announced yesterday that 4th Edition D&D is indeed coming our way in mid-2008. I really, really couldn’t be more excited, particularly after reading this post on EN World.

The above post gives a number of tantalizing details, doesn’t it. Character classes go up to 30th level? Racial abilities beyond 1st level? Racial class powers? And what’s all this about new power sources and a change in resource management? I can only hope that they’re revamping spellcasting to make low-level casters more viable after their first fight of the day. All this, and it even says that a lot of the changes were tested in Star Wars Saga Edition and The Book of Nine Swords. Now, I can’t speak to Nine Swords since I haven’t read it yet, but you all know, I’m sure, how I feel about Saga Edition.

Like I said, I couldn’t be more excited. Unfortunately, the official site (previously 4venture) is currently down, probably due to the glut of curious and excited D&D fans rushing Wizards’ virtual doors in hopes of discovering some hitherto unknown tidbit of information. I guess I’ll have to wait to see it.

For those who have not already, go and look at this.

Back, are you? I believe that the popular theory is that this is a countdown clock to the announcement of Fourth Edition D&D, and that’s certainly what it looks like to me. Many people would add a lot of doom and gloom at this point: “It’s too soon!”, or “They’re obsoleting my material!” I won’t be doing that. I look at this with pure optimism and anticipation, for two main reasons.

First, while it’s only been a scant seven years since the release of 3E, I feel somewhat satiated with it. I maintain that the d20 System is a good one, particularly for what it was originally intended for: heroic fantasy. I enjoy playing with it, and I like D&D. But really, how many new rules do you need for 3E? I used to get really excited about the new crunch books, books like Song and Silence or Masters of the Wild. But since the advent of 3.5, I’ve felt that it’s largely been more of the same, a simple updating of material that I’d already seen. In fact, the only D&D supplements that I’ve really been interested in in recent years are those geared toward my favored campaign setting, Eberron.

The second reason is that I have seen Star Wars Saga Edition, it it is good. I can only hope that the changes wrought in that iteration of the d20 System presage those yet to be enacted in Fourth Edition, and if that is indeed the case, it will be something truly special. I hunger for a slimmed-down class list, with a single class that covers ranger, fighter, and barbarian, and another that covers wizard, sorcerer, and cleric alike. I dearly hope that they continue to use the Condition Track, being that it is a unified mechanic that simplifies 90% of the rules bloat in D&D.

At any rate, this is all purely conjecture. I hope that I’m right, that this is coming, because this is the most excited I’ve been about D&D for more than a few years (the release of Eberron is the last time I really felt something like this). I guess we’ll find out in less than a day, won’t we?

[Edit: The countdown is now over, but the website is down. Methinks Wizards underestimated their traffic.]

Not strictly game related, but my wife and I just got done moving to a new house. Now, I say “done” in the loosest of terms, and it should be taken to mean, “technically we live here, but we’re still pretty much living out of boxes”. It’s been an interesting experience, this being only our second house. I guess you just never know how much stuff you’ve managed to cram into your house until you have to pack it all onto a truck, drive it somewhere else, and then try to get it all out into some semblance of order. Luckily I have the next two weeks off, so I’ll be able to get the house into livable shape over that time. Some advice for people planning on moving in the near future:

• If you need a check mailed to you at work, particularly if it’s being mailed from someone who doesn’t know you personally (like an investment firm or your retirement fund), make sure you spell out for them who the check should be made out to. I got a check mailed to my workplace, and it was made out to . . . my workplace.
• If someone else is driving the U-Haul, and they’re planning on leaving the state and coming back tomorrow, make sure they either leave the keys or turn off the headlights. Not doing both equals dead battery.
• Don’t rent a truck from U-Haul. Just don’t.
• If you have to cancel your cable, make sure you know what you’re getting into. You may, for example, have to wait on hold for more than forty minutes, like I did, for what amounted to a five-minute phone call, even including the fact that someone else’s name had been put on my account by accident.

Anyway. Moving is . . . something.