Monstrous Personalities offers examples of non-combat encounters with monsters, creatures, and critters of the Dungeons and Dragons game.

A messenger approaches the player characters.  He bears a message asking the characters to meet with a potential employer, and offering them a fairly significant payment just to attend the meeting.  If the characters seem suspicious, offer to allow them to arrange the location of the meeting, with the only specification being that it should be somewhere private.

Everything about this meeting is legitimate, the only potential problem is that those requesting the meeting are kobold chief and 3-5 other members of his tribe.  This tribe acted as servants to an elderly dragon who recently died of old age, and now they need protection from other tribes in the area, and from other outsiders who might show up seeking the dragon’s treasure.

What happens from here depends on your players.  They could simply take their payment for attending the meeting and it would end there.  They could do exactly what the kobold fear and decide to go and try to take the dragon’s hoard for themselves.  Or they could accept the offer and this could be the start of a single adventure, or even a campaign where the player characters act as guardians to this kobold tribe.

Should they decide to try to get the treasure for themselves, be sure it is not an easy task.  If the player characters don’t take the job, it is quite likely the kobolds will find some form of protection for their treasure, whether they hire another group of adventurers, or purchase some sort of guardian creature.

If they take the job, they will be expected to protect the treasure from any number of possible opponents: parties of adventurers, rival kobold tribes, another dragon.  And while the kobolds will be somewhat generous due to their sudden wealth, allowing players unfettered access to the magical items in a dragon’s hoard could swiftly imbalance the game.  Either have the magic items missing, already taken by adventurers who took the most valuable objects, or place some of the magic items in a secret room well hidden by the piles of treasure.

The limits of where this encounter leads is only limited by where the players want to go with it.

As a follow-up to last week’s list of WOTC releases I’m looking forward to, here are a few products from other publishers I’m looking forward to.  Because we’re about half way into January at least one of these items may already have hit the shelves.   As with my WOTC list, this is in no particular order:

1) Crime Pays from Goodman Games.  I love playing city based games, and the underworld is always important element of those sessions or campaigns.  Hoping to see find some good ideas to borrow from this one. 

2) GameMastery Flip-Mat: Prison from Paizo.  Perhaps this fits in with Crime Pays, a good prison break scenario, either with the PCs as prisoners, or breaking someone else out of the prison. 

3) Dragon Age: The RPG.  So much chatter about this game.  I haven’t even played the computer version.  I doubt I’ll pick this up, but I hope to get a chance to take a look at it. 

Anything you would reccomend I get a look at?  Please leave a comment.

This would have been a ’5 Most Awaited Products of 2010′ post, but I realized that 3 of the 5 slots would be taken up by the Players Handbook 3, Dungeon Masters Guide 3, and Monster Manual 3. So while I am looking forward to those products, here are a few others that I can’t wait to lay my hands on (in no particular order). I’ve focused on Wizards of the Coast products here, and will have a post of non-WOTC posts next week.

Players Handbook Races: Dragonborn: I’m not neccesarily a huge fan of Dragonborn, but I do like the idea of WOTC bringing out some lower cost handbooks with a tight focus. May not pick up every book in the series, but I’ll certainly pick up this first offering and if it delivers I’ll be picking up versions for some of my favorite races.

Hammerfast: A Dwarven Outpost Adventure Site: Another product coming in at a slightly lower pricepoint. Add to that the fact that it’s about Dwarves, and I’ll almost certainly be picking up a copy of this.

Harrowing Halls: While I’ve written here about free printable dungeon tiles, I still love the tiles put out by WOTC. I think they’re generally gorgeous, and their heavy stock makes them quite durable.  This set is especially exciting because they’re adding in some 3D elements.

Tomb of Horrors: Always enjoy seeing how they update this classic in new editions. Though I don’t pick up many adventures I will be buying this.

Dark Sun: I didn’t pick up the 4E Forgotten Realms Campaign setting, but I will be picking up Dark Sun books. While I love traditional fantasy setting, I’m even more interested in seeing how they handle some of less ‘standard’ mechanics of this setting.

I know there will be products in the second half of the year that are equally interesting, and of course I’ll be picking up at least a few booster packs of the various miniature releases, but these products are the ones I’m most looking forward to seeing.

What products are you looking forward to in 2010?  Please, leave a comment.

Last week at GenCon, Wizards of the Coast announced that their campaign setting for 2010 would be Dark Sun.

Prior to the convention I’d heard a lot of people guessing that the next setting would be Dragonlance, and while I would have been happy to see them publish the Dragonlance setting for 4E, I think Dark Sun has the opportunity to be better because some aspects of the world differ greatly from the medieval European flavor present in many other settings.

Here are the top 5 things I’m looking forward to seeing in the Dark Sun campaign setting when it releases next year:

5) Thri-Kreen. Though I don’t believe I ever played one, I thought these psionic insects represented a significant difference from the player character races at the time. It did make me shake my head when I searched on Google to make sure I spelled it right, I found a page titled ‘Thri-Kreen Erotica’ (no link, you’ll have to work if you really want to find it).

4) Nature destroying magic – in the only Dark Sun games I played in, I think this was glossed over a bit during game play, though it was used as the explanation why so much of the world was desolate. When I initially saw the 4E Bullywugs, I thought their mechanic might serve as some version of the blight caused by magic use in Dark Sun.

3) Half-giants – maybe not quite as cool now that we have goliath’s around, though I imagine half giants as even taller and broader than goliaths, and wielding weapons designed for creatures even larger than themselves.

2) Killer environment – While I expect there will be other mechanics created for this, the burning deserts seem like a great place to show off skill challenges.

1) Psionics – Love them, or hate them, the mechanics of psionics always bring something different to the table. Curious whether the idea of replacing encounter powers with ‘Augmentations’ to daily powers as the DDI release of the Psion class does will carry over to other psionic classes as well.

I’m sure all of these will be the topic of some debate/discussion across various Internet forums for the next 10 months or so. I’m also sure the designers will provide some very interesting mechanics, and in the end there’s will probably be something that I’m not expecting that I’ll be interested in when Dark Sun 4E finally hits the shelves.

Perhaps this is a bit late, with GenCon ending today, but with Virtual GenCon there is no time limit! We can keep enjoying GenCon for weeks if we’d like. Some of these are repeats, now that GenCon is in swing, some of the searches mentioned ealier are now full of fun things to see, read, or listen to!

Twitter:

The #GenCon tag has been wonderfully informative and entertaining, take some time to give it a read.

To be honest, with the chaos of GenCon I thought the folks I was following might be a little quiet during GenCon, but they all did a marvelous job Tweeting from GenCon, keeping me informed and entertained!

Blogs:

Don’t think I mentioned either of these before, but they both did a great job of providing some convention coverage:

Temple Lion

RPG Blog II Links to lots of pictures too!

Pictures:

Flickr: Here’s the link to the GenCon search, sorted by date. I should have checked the count, I believe there have been about 1500 more results in the search now that when I looked at the begining of the convention.

Yfrog: This is a site people use to post pictures to the Twitter feeds. Here’s a GenCon search there.

Picasa: Don’t know if it is just me, but I’m not getting many ‘recent’ results on this, but here’s the link, since Virtual GenCon has no time limit.

Podcasts:

This Just in From GenCon has posted 6 podcasts from GenCon as of this writing.

Pixels and Grids has posted 2 podcasts from GenCon as of this writing.

You can also subscribe to both podcasts using iTunes.

I’ll have some reaction to the news from GenCon over the next week or two as more is revealed by those returning from the convention.

Giant Spider Version 2

This continues my test drive of the DDI Monster Builder, and takes a different route to another Giant Spider.

Again I’ve started from an existing creature, the Bristle Spider. After renaming the creature I adjusted the level. While this changed a lot of the stats and damage levels, there were still a couple things that still didn’t seem quite right.

While it might work fine at the higher level, the Acidic Poison spray, an at will burst 5 power, seemed a bit out of line for this level even at a reduced damage amount. I changed it to an encounter power, eliminated the acidic effects, and lowered the ongoing damage from 10 to 5.

I also eliminated Bristle Blast, a second close burst 5 power. I don’t believe there’s a hard and fast rule about how many powers a monster at a certain level, and because this one causes no physical damage and the blind and daze effects only last a round, I considered keeping it. It just felt like overkill considering both the remaining powers will slow party members in addition to the initial damage and ongoing poison damage.

Eliminating this power revealed one minor problem, perhaps I’m just overly cautious, but when I went to remove the power, the software gave me a warning about deleting the power. No big deal as long as the power is just being deleted from the creature, but the wording of the warning was enough to make me go back and look a little closer, worried I might have been removing the power from the database entirely. Inserting ‘from this creature’ into the warning would have eliminated any chance of confusion.

The other slightly annoying thing I keep experiencing is that when you leave a creature your editing, the sofware warns you that changes will be lost and gives you a chance to save the creature. A good feature, but annoying if you’ve just saved the creature and then immediately tried to leave the creature editing area of the software.

Next I’ll be using the DDI Monster Builder to create a spider from scratch instead of basing it on an existing creature. Looking forward to your questions and comments on either my creations, or the Monster Builder software.

Created using the DDI Monster Builder

When I posted the Giant Spider last week, I didn’t know just how close the DDI Monster Builder was to going live, so here’s a new version, almost identical to the last.  The only rules difference is the Monster Builder was smart enough to decrease the bonus on the ‘Bloodied Web’ to match the level of the creature, while I had left the bonus equal to that of the original creature from which I borrowed it from.

The other significant difference is that using the Monster Builder it took only about 10 minutes to create this version, while the one posted last week took 30 or 40 minutes, much of it simply tied up in the typing and formatting. Again I based my creature on the Deathrattle Viper, made a couple adjustments (size, speed, adding the Bloodied Web ability, removing the Deathrattle aura) and I had a finished creature.

There are certainly some issues to be worked out with the Monster builder, for example I didn’t see an easy way to put in immunities, and I had to manually enter the ‘free, when first bloodied’, which wasn’t difficult, but took an experiment or two before I managed to get it entered properly, at first I didn’t realize I could create an entry not included on the pull down menu, then I managed to enter it and have it clear itself out before finally getting it to stick.

Over the next couple of weeks I’m going to create a few more creatures and explore the Monster Builder further. I may even try another version of the Giant Spider based on an existing Huge Spider and see how the Monster Builder performs when making a fairly large change in levels to a creature.

Good evening,

While I should probably wait a bit and give a more well thought introduction, since this site is technically live, I wanted to give the short version of what this site is/will be.

This site will be my personal RPG blog. Here I’ll write mostly about Dungeons and Dragons, though other role-playing games and related topics will certainly pop up from time to time.

The word ‘Briefs’ in the title is because I plan on limiting my posts to between 400 and 750 words, though occasionally I’ll post longer ‘Rants’ (this is the Internet after all).

So welcome, and expect a lot of furniture moving. It will be about 2 weeks before I start with actual posts, as I try and get the site looking the way I’d like.

Safe travels,

Paul

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!