So it feels like this is as good a time as any to begin ending my campaign in Fallow’s Vale. Fallow’s Vale has been great, it’s allowed us to play some D&D while I was living in Nashville with friends from around the US, and it’s played right into the sweetspot of 4E D&D, which is points of light exploration.

However, I’m feeling ready for a different type of gaming, and I think Bellona will make a great campaign world.

The elevator pitch for Bellona is that something has happened in this city and now everyone is just trying to scrape by. The PCs however, have bigger plans. Perhaps it’s like New Orleans after Katrina, a city struggling to rebuild after a horrible disaster. Or maybe it’s like Gotham in No Man’s Land or New York in DMZ, with larger than life characters vying for control of various parts of the city. Or maybe it’s like it’s namesake, Bellona from the book Dhalgren by Delaney, a city so broken it’s memory has been forgotten by the rest of the world.

I see a major component of this campaign being the map. Each gaming session, the players will look at the map, and try to determine which faction or section of the city to put pressure on next. They’ll be forced into treaties with unsavory groups and individuals, and slowly they will build their own army of followers to do with as they see fit.

Perhaps their goal is to reform the city into a working community, possibly with the PCs at the top. Or maybe they just seek to plunder the riches of the city and try to find buyers outside the city. Or maybe they just wish to settle old scores and finish what the Gods/man/nature has started and burn the city down to the ground.

He comes down pretty hard on the Great Wheel as a place that wouldn’t be very fun to adventure in. Having been a huge Planescape fan, I might have to disagree. While I agree that many of the places he mentions (the elemental planes, the positive and negative energy planes) won’t be fun to adventure in, I think that’s kind of the point. The idea is that, is a player supposed to be able to go every where in a campaign, or are there places they just can’t go, no matter what.

Ultimately, I tend to view D&D cosmetology to be very malleable. The players are never going to walk from Sigil to one of the evil planes, or from the plane of water to the plane of earth. Instead it’s going to be through some form of magical means that they will arrive at a new location.

So how it’s organized matters less to me, than how I can apply it to my story I’m telling as a player or as a DM. Sometimes that includes having a villain threaten to send a player to the negative energy plane to die. And sometimes it’ll include the players adventuring in the Feywild or Astral Sea or in Sigil or Bytopia. Ultimately, the planes are meant to encompass all possible belief and possibility, so if things don’t always make sense to the players, I feel like it isn’t supposed to, berk. (Just a little planescape reference…)

Thanks to a post on Wizards, David Guyll over at Points of Light has written about fighters and multiple attacks. He has a lot of requests to improve fighters, which include no penalties for multiple attacks, no feat taxes and a bunch of other ideas. I have to admit, I never liked the 3E fighter, because it seemed like you had to play the feat game and plan out exactly what your character was going to get at ever level, which seemed to make the actual adventuring mean less.

Over at Syntax Error, Sage Latorra has a lot to say about the latest poll from wizards. Not so much about the choices, like keeping THAC0 and gender penalties, but rather how the open design approach might backfire. There is a idea called the Parkinson’s Triviality Principle, which states that the smaller a project something is, the more input you’ll get. Since almost everyone who has ever played with a tabletop game has likely tried tinkering with the rules, even the most trivial of rules will get a lot of input from the public. So, Sage is worried that the game that WOTC is designing might very well get derailed by all the input by the public. We shall definitely see as the process moves forward.

Haven’t seen as much commentary out there these days. My guess is that many of the people who might be commenting are under NDAs. Anyone see anything interesting? If you’ve seen some insightful forum posts, I’d like those too. I find myself reading fewing and fewer forums these days, partially because of time, and partially because every discussion seems to become a edition war.

Take care and happy gaming!

I definitely go back and forth thinking about what I love in RPG. Ultimately, I think it is just quality.

What are the best adventures made of?
The best adventures have a number of common features for me. First, they aren’t too long. While I love hearing from my friends who buy them synopsis of adventure paths, I have no real desire to buy or play them. I know that there is no hope with the groups I play with to ever complete one of them. Instead, I like sort, quick adventures that hint at, but doesn’t enforce, a setting. In fact, some of my favorite adventures were the sets of adventures that TSR released with some of the campaign settings in 2nd edition. They could be tied together if you wanted to, but each adventure was self-contained. Which would be perfect for the people I play with, as we all have lives and most of us have kids. We want to roleplay, but we just don’t have the time to play long drawn out campaigns.

What do the worst adventure do wrong?
I think this is pretty simple for me: non-sensical story or encounters, railroading and overly long adventures.

What kills an adventure before it even gets off the ground?
Playing a game system that no one wants to.

What’s your favorite system? What are the things you love about it most? WHY?
My favorite system is the one my friends are playing. Secondly, I value simplicity and fun. I don’t want to be bogged down while creating a character by complex options and plans, but I like to have the options I make at character creation have both mechanical and roleplaying implications.

With D&D Next on the horizon, I’m sure you have an opinion regarding what the next edition should or shouldn’t be once it’s out.
I don’t really have a ton of opinions on what it should be, other than I really hope it gets more players into this great hobby of ours.

I could totally see my players freaking out when the first embryonic magical beast pops out of the black pool. And then spending the next 2 hours trying to figure out just what is going on.

Quick Summary
Zogorion: Lord of the Hippogriffs is written by Jason Sholtis and is a short but sweet mini-adventure in folio zine format. You might know Jason Sholtis from his blog Dungeon Dozen where he publishes a new random d12 table every day. It concerns the PCs encounter with a band of Hippogriffs led by a strange and unusual creature. The adventure uses the Swords & Wizardry ruleset, otherwise known as original D&D and is for level 3-7. It was written originally as a quick google hangouts adventure that the author fleshed out into a great little adventure.

Artwork
The artwork was great. It was mostly in a late 70′s black and white cartoonish style. The cover by John Larrey was excellent and features the party enjoying a dinner Zogorion. The map is very much in the style of classic adventures, with lots of little details to help the DM describe each room and evokes the cave locale well. My one complaint is that the lines to show elevation are a little too dark, and distract from the actual cave map. I would actually recommend they be removed all together. The interior artwork include a hippogriff, a vampire, a goblin and, my favorite, a scene showing a hippogriff carrying a large catfish.

Adventure
While I’m not a big OD&D player, I really enjoyed reading the adventure. I could easily see myself converting and running this as a 4E adventure (although with the longer 4E combats, I think it might take twice as long to play through). He includes lots of good suggestions as to how to run it, while giving the reader many ways to adapt it to their own play style or campaign. He starts of with a quick introduction and then details each room of the cave. There’s a definite direction that events are expected to go but the writing makes clear that there are a lot of different ways for the PCs to go through the adventure.

Additional Information
The zine is $2 and ships very quickly. I ordered it and got it within 3 business days, which is faster than most online purchases.

Final Recommendation
I highly recommend that you pick this up. For $2, it’s a steal!

4 1/2 out of 5 stars. Highly Recommend.

Not only is it a great story, it includes a reference to Magic: The Gathering and d4′s.

Enjoy!

Right now, I’m not entirely sure if this game will take place  in the past, present or future.  I imagine it’ll end up being a D&D type game, as it’ll get more players interested in playing, but I could see it using a sci-fi ruleset.  Really, this is less about the individual character ruleset, but more about the ruleset to manage territory controlled by the players and the gang members/residents they have in their employ.

Inspirations: 

Dhalgren: One of my all time favorite novels, Samuel Delaney’s tour de force concerns a surrealistic city cut off from the rest of the world by some apocalyptic event.

DMZ: America has devolved into a civil war between the Government and the Free States.  A reporter lands in Manhattan and begins reporting on the experiences of the residents still in the DMZ.

Batman – No Man’s Land: After a earthquake has destroyed Gotham, the U.S. has decided to declare the city no longer part of the U.S.  So of course the gangs take control, and Batman, along with his allies, have to fight to win back the city block by block.