By Logan Bonner

Illustration by Richard Sardinha

“Maybe we attack elfs an’ we die. We don’t attack, worgs get mad an’ eat us. Elf arrow better’n worg teeth.” —Grak, goblin beast rider Though wild wolves can be dangerous, they’re never as vicious as worgs. These hulking canine beasts ripple with muscle under their coarse fur, and anyone who looks in one’s eyes can see signs of its almost human intelligence. The viciousness of worgs has made them legendary, the villains of many a cautionary fable told to children who wander astray.

 

Voracious Carnivores: Worgs always hunger. Their bodies run hot, and they spend most of their waking hours hunting for food. Though they are willing to eat any creature that bleeds and screams, their favorite prey is people. Worgs travel through the wilds near roads so they have the best chance of finding humanoid travelers.

 

When ...

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Considering the D&D Next Playtest in Light of the WotC Seminars

February 7, 2012

OK. So it’s a little over a week after the D&D Next playtest at DDXP.

In my previous post, I was extremely circumspect regarding my playtest experience. This was due, of course, to the NDA which WotC required all playtesters to sign.

The closed playtest, however, was not the only event going on at the convention. WotC presented a seminar each day, and all but one of the seminars dealt, in some way, with D&D Next. I have now had a chance to go over the seminar transcripts in detail, and to identify which information WotC has decided to make public.

Since my NDA only prohibits me from revealing confidential information, I feel comfortable commenting in more detail on aspects of the new system which WotC discussed at the seminars. This gives ...

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My first look at D&D Next

January 30, 2012

I guarantee–when I woke up on January 9, I had absolutely no intention of making a 20 hour round-trip to attend the “D&D Experience” convention in Ft. Wayne, Indiana.

By the next day, I had purchased my ticket to the convention, and was in the midst of planning the road-trip with Joe and Lauren, a couple of friends from my gaming group.

That’s how quickly things can change when you receive unexpected news.

There I was, at a little after 7:00 in the morning, sitting on my couch and reading EN World on my iPad. I was keeping up with the latest in a seemingly endless series of threads speculating on the imminent release of the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons. I admit–until this particular morning, I was firmly in the camp which believed that ...

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By Andy Collins

Art by William O’Conner

The Magic Item Compendium introduced the concept of levels for magic items. This primarily served to help DMs determine what magic items to place in a treasure hoard (or to give to his NPCs). Since we built that level system around the existing magic item prices, it was an imperfect solution (for instance, a few non-epic magic items exceeded the pricing scheme for level 1-20 items).

 

Fourth Edition D&D improves that useful tool by explicitly linking a magic item’s level to its price. For example, all 9th-level magic items now cost the same number of gp to craft or to purchase. This makes it even easier to gauge a magic item’s appropriateness for your game at a glance. Don’t know if it’s OK to drop a flying carpet into the hands of your 9th-level PCs? Well, the ...

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By James Wyatt

In D&D, the words “adventure” and “quest” are virtually synonymous. They both mean a journey, fraught with danger that you undertake for a specific purpose. We sometimes joke that the game is all about killing monsters and taking their stuff, but the reality is that the game is about adventures. You go into the dungeon and kill monsters with a larger purpose in mind: to stop their raids on caravans, to rescue the townsfolk they’ve captured, to retrieve the lost Scepter of the Adamantine Kings for the rightful descendant of those kings.

 

Quests are the story glue that binds encounters together into adventures. They turn what would otherwise be a disjointed series of combats and interactions into a narrative -- a story with a beginning, a middle, and a climactic ending. They give characters a reason for doing what they do, and a feeling of accomplishment ...

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A Pathfinder Campaign Setting Supplement

 

Real-world myths and legends have always been the best places to draw monsters from—or at least, that’s how we at Paizo feel. While it can be fun to make up brand-new monsters, to guide a heretofore unseen creation through its growing pains and tailor it specifically to its environment or role, there’s an entirely different sort of fun that comes from playing with monsters established by hundreds or thousands of years of tradition.

 

Sometimes the fun is in the familiarity. Your players already know mummies and vampires, and have been enjoying them for years in films, literature, and campfire ghost stories. When players conquer these adversaries, they’re connecting with a tradition they already love, and half the fun is in joining your own story with that vast tapestry of storytelling.

 

At the same time, there are a million historical monsters that ...

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A Pathfinder Core Rulebook, Advanced Player´s Guide, Ultimate Magic & Ultimate Combat

 

Alchemist

Whether secreted away in a smoky basement laboratory or gleefully experimenting in a well-respected school of magic, the alchemist is often regarded as being just as unstable, unpredictable, and dangerous as the concoctions he brews. While some creators of alchemical items content themselves with sedentary lives as merchants, providing tindertwigs and smokesticks, the true alchemist answers a deeper calling. Rather than cast magic like a spellcaster, the alchemist captures his own magic potential within liquids and extracts he creates, infusing his chemicals with virulent power to grant him impressive skill with poisons, explosives, and all manner of self-transformative magic.

Antipaladin

Although it is a rare occurrence, paladins do sometimes stray from the path of righteousness. Most of these wayward holy warriors seek out redemption and forgiveness for their misdeeds, regaining their powers through piety, charity, and powerful ...

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Against the Giants is an adventure module written by Gary Gygax and published by TSR in 1981 for the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy roleplaying game. It combines the G series of modules previously published in 1978: Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl, and Hall of the Fire Giant King. All three were produced for use with the 1st edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules. In 1999, to recognize the 25th anniversary of TSR, the company released an updated version, Against the Giants: The Liberation of Geoff. Later in 1999, Wizards of the Coast published a novelization of Against the Giants by Ru Emerson.

The plot of each of the three original modules focuses on a particular type of evil giant. Each can be played as a standalone adventure, or as a series. In Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, a tribe of hill giants have ...

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A Discussion of Alignment in AD&D by Peter Vialls WD November 1985

One of the central problems in an AD&D campaign is the alignment structure: what is 'chaotic good' behaviour? (Or lawful neutral, neutral evil et al?) The rulebooks are little help -the   answer must come from the DM's personal preference.

 

The question is important; as Lew Pulsipher said in a very early White Dwarf, to ignore alignment is to short-change the players. Also, it ignores a source of much of the flavour of AD&D. Critics who claim that alignment is unnecessary are ignoring the problems inherent in an unaligned game. In Traveller, for example, in the space of a few minutes, a character can change in nature from pleasant to vicious with no harm apart from that to characterisation. One answer is to insist that players choose natures and aims for their characters, and penalise ...

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