Come play, it’s fun! I am very pleased at the respect that is being paid to gamers of all stripes; OSR questions exist next to 4e questions exist next to story game questions and so on. It is a great place to ask questions and get answers. Read the FAQ first. It explains everything.
Lady Blackbird, Vanguard, and Lunar Notes. A few pages, perhaps pregenerated characters, rules on the character sheets. That’s interesting.
I’m not sure how I missed the Ken Hite-scribed setting coming from Atomic Overmind Press, in which the Nazis summoned Jormungandr (original), only to see it nuked by the United States (original), which led to disastrous physical and occult effects including monsters (original), not to mention Soviet giants (original) and a generally battered world (original). But I did. So there it is in case you did too.
The Character Builder has been updated, so I started fiddling around with Players Handbook 2 ideas. The first thing I statted up was a human shaman named Bivvy, who claims to be of a noble family fallen on hard times. His spirit companion is a butler. “Whichever type of spirit companion you choose, it can have any appearance you like.” I’m just sayin'. He’s taking Wrath of Winter as one of his at-wills, on the premise that the butler ought to be able to appear at someone’s side noiselessly. Also, I think, Blessing of the Seven Winds. Bit of a tornado, what? ...
This would be the newest thing to do.
Danger, Will Robinson! D&D post! (I know. But I can’t bring myself to clog up the community with boring crap about a character nobody actually plays with. Er, clog it up more than once, anyhow.)
Just in case anyone was missing it – most of my D&D commentary will wind up over here, since I wanted my compatriots to be able to post as well.
I tried using a stack of index cards instead of an initiative tracker last session, and it worked out pretty well. I put most of the monster stats on each card, plus checkboxes for hit points. I think it was smoother than using the tracker. I may need to put more of the stats on each card; I kept having to go back to the book. Maybe only for more or less simple monsters, and Big Bads can still require book reference? ...
As per request, quick summaries of the tools I’m using to GM D&D 4e: First cool tool: the GameMastery Combat Pad Initiative Tracker. It’s a wet/dry erase board with a steel core and a bunch of magnets that you shuffle around to track initiative. It works very well; in the first session, I was pretty much able to run combats with the module and the tracker held in one hand. However, it’s got a lot of wasted space. ...
I’m still trying to fuse the brilliant combat engine from D&D 4e with the brilliant narrative engine from Gumshoe. You may not have known I was trying to do this. But I am. Let’s skip over the skills question for now and pretend that we have a Gumshoe adventure all mapped out, with the multiple paths and the clues and the major and minor scenes. It’s a flowchart, basically. None of these scenes are directly combat-related, although it may require combat to reach a given scene. Here, have a PDF example. Contains spoilers for the Esoterrorists sample adventure, though! ...