Wizards Watch: One Tale Ends…

Posted on November 20, 2012 by Tolrendordm

Wizards Watch LogoSad news this week that Kobold Quarterly is to stop after more than 5 years of publication. Thankfully this only means the actual quarterly magazine, not the excellent PRG products published under the Open Design/Kobold Quarterly (and now Kobold Press) banner. Wolfgang Baur writes emotively about this decision, which has come about simply because he and his wife need a break from the workload. Its a massive shame, as KQ was one of the only professionally produced RPG magazines not tied to a specific game company, but on the other hand it is completely understandable. Kobold Press is becoming one of the best and most dynamic RPG companies around, with an ever-expanding product line, and I’m sure the kobolds are still pretty busy in their mines!

On that note, I’ve just received my hard-cover Patron Edition (No. 130/200!) of the Midgard Campaign Setting – a product I’ve begun reviewing, based on the PDF. I say just received, but I really mean just opened! Can you believe my wife stuck it in a pile while I was away on business … and only just remembered to tell me about it! 🙂 I had been about to contact the kobolds and see if their courier was lost!

Anyway, the key point is that I mentioned in my initial thoughts about the product how good it looked, and that was based on the electronic version. Well, all I can say is that the print edition really confirms this! The art work and layout look stunning, especially the full page spreads introducing each chapter. Its a proper A4 (roughly) size tome, with stitched binding and a bookmark ribbon. Quality all round!

KQ may have come to an end, but Kobold Press rolls on. Wolfgang, thanks for the great magazine, but I look forward to more great RPG products in the future!

Posted in Columns, Wizards Watch | 1 Comment

Midgard: The World is Ready …

Posted on October 28, 2012 by Tolrendordm

As many of you will know, Kobold Press (formerly Open Design/Kobold Quarterly) recently launched a new major product: Midgard Campaign Setting. This is a full fantasy world based on Wolfgang Baur’s personal campaign, which we’ve been lucky enough to share snippets of through the pages of Kobold Quarterly and Open Design products over the last few years.

I am very proud to have been a supporter of this and a number of Midgard products through Open Design’s patronage model (which was well established before Kickstarter became all the rage – in fact I believe this product was the last Open Design project before they too got on the Kickstarter bandwagon).

I’ve been avidly devouring the material since I received my PDF copy, and wanted to share some of my impressions on this blog. At almost 300 pages of pretty densely packed material, this is way too much for one post – so I’m going to make this into a mini-series. So here goes:

First Impressions:

This is a beautiful product! The cover (as per the image above) is a marvellously evocative piece (see here for the artist’s comments) inspired by a medieval etching. The border panel around three sides is used throughout the book on the right hand page in a partly transparent parchment style, providing a slightly darker border to the main page, and re-appearing in the burnished gold colour bordering a glorious full page colour artwork at the start of each chapter. The ‘panes’ in the border allow a glimpse of another image, such as a map.

The text is a nice readable font, if perhaps a little small, and most of the headings and banners are shades of brown and gold, with evocative little images throughout e.g. a World Serpent icon for chapter numbers, and a set of gears (the icon of Rava the Gear Goddess) surrounding each page number. Sidebars are highlighted by a darker parchment background (with a subtle pattern of decorative swirls), and along with interior art/maps are ‘attached’ to the page with picture corners. The main cartography is by Jon Roberts, which is as awesome as usual!

Overall the book consists of two introductory chapters (overview and player character info) followed by seven chapters each exploring a distinct region, and finished off by a chapter on the deities and religions of the world, plus appendices (covering use of the setting with the AGE system, random encounters and further reading).

Welcome to Midgard!

The first chapter provides an overview of the setting, from an initial page highlighting seven ‘secrets’ that make the setting special, through a brief history, information on the cosmology and calendar, and onto lore (and game information) about ley lines, the magical rivers of power which infuse the world of Midgard.

I remember an early comment on the Open Design forums (Patrons are able to see and contribute to the brainstorming and design ideas of each project) where Wolfgang made it clear he was only interested in historical information where it stimulated current adventures, and this chapter delivers here. In only five pages (including a couple half-page images), the entire history of the setting is covered in evocative language which gives an overview of the long ages of the world, but still littered with specific concepts and hooks which I’m sure will be picked out and developed in the regional chapters.

The second chapter discusses the races of Midgard, especially those from which are drawn the main heroes (player characters…) of the world: Humans, dragonkin, elves and elf marked, dwarves, gearforged, kobolds and minotaurs. The information here is tight and focussed on how the cultures of these races are portrayed in a Midgard setting. Game information (Pathfinder Role-playing Game compatible) is kept in side-bars. The gearforged, a race of mechanical bodies and living souls, is a Midgard specific race that looks a huge amount of fun to play (“sorry guys, need to oil up before we can move out …”). The chapter is rounded out by a set of Midgard specific feats and traits allowing you to give regional flavour to your characters.

The overall impression (which Wolfgang freely calls out in his foreword) is a world conceptually drawn from Germanic/Slavic/Norse mythology more than the traditional western European sources, but with many twists and additions. There also is a slightly dark feel to the setting, for example there is a sidebar on ‘Human Corruption’, whilst the cantonal dwarves are portrayed as arrogant and militaristic, regularly raiding the surrounding lands and keeping ‘thralls’.

To my reading, there is a slight D&D 4E flavour – from the prescence of dragonkin (a Midgard twist on the Dragonborn race), tieflings (product of the corrupted magocracies if the Wasted West), the creation myths, the ‘withdrawal of the elves’, and the general ‘civilisation is fading/points of light’ feel. Now I fully realise that these ideas are not original or exclusive to 4E, but it is my understanding that Wolfgang was playing 4E in his home campaign when the project kicked off, so maybe some of these ideas in the setting reflect that.

In fact one of my only disappointments about the whole product is that it is not 4E-based. I’m not complaining, as it was a completely democratic vote amongst the patrons at the beginning of the project as to which settings would be supported, but I’d love to see this product in 4E colours 🙂 Maybe a supplement will be released in the future (please…)

Where next…?

Why, we’re at a crossroads … quite literally, as Chapter 3 documents the heartlands of Midgard, the Crossroads region which includes the Free City of Zobeck, where the tale of this world in print began. We’ll take a look here in the next mini-review …

Posted in Midgard Campaign Setting, Reviews, World Building | 6 Comments

Wizards Watch: An Admission

Posted on October 17, 2012 by Tolrendordm

Wizards Watch LogoOk, Ok! I’m one of the eighty-five thousand plus people that have downloaded the DnD Next Playtest material, according to Mike Mearls himself (who should know…)

Thing is, I have to admit that I haven’t actually played it!

And the real truth is, I don’t think I’ll be playing it anytime soon.

This is nothing to do with the playtest materials themselves, or in fact any negative views about the next edition of the game. Quite the contrary, I’ve been interested in the downloads up until now; have quite liked what I see, and have been reading all the updates and comments. I’ll admit I haven’t been hugely impressed with the adventures that have been chosen to accompany the materials. Although they are clearly based on classics, and seem to have been chosen to test the early ‘Basic D&D’ feel the design team are clearly striving for,  the free-form nature doesn’t seem to me best suited to the requirements of a playtest. But that’s a minor complaint overall.

I have tried to get enthused about starting a DnD Next Playtest several times, and even started re-doing the maps of the Caves of Chaos. But it hasn’t happenned. I think there are two main reasons for this:

1) All of my D&D play is with my kids. Although the DnD Next rules look like they’ll be great for this eventually, at the moment there’s a bit too much flux for a kids’ campaign I think. They’ve embraced 4E, especially the races such as dragonborn and eladrin which may not even exist in DnD Next, and they’re both playing Beastmaster Rangers. The ‘powers’ structure of 4E is pretty familiar to them, and seems to work well for our game. I don’t really want to pitch them into another set of classes and rules temporarily.

2) Realistically, we don’t get nearly enough time to play D&D anyway, given the school, sports, work etc commitments that a typical family with 2 near-teen kids seems to have! So when we do get time, I want to play, not playtest, and there is so much 4E material available to use, right at the moment, I don’t want to be putting the effort into trying to run DnD Next adventures with a relatively small amount of material (or at least a significant amount of re-skinning).

So that’s where I’m at, which also means for the forseeable future, this blog will remain firmly concentrating on 4E matters. To me, there is a huge amount more life in the current edition – one day I’m sure DnD Next will be ready, and I’ll still contribute where I can to the process – but in meantime I intend to keep on creating, DMing and playing as much as possible with what I’ve got 🙂

Posted in Columns, DnD Next, Roleplaying with Kids, Wizards Watch | 5 Comments

RPG Blog Carnival: Playing in Established Settings

Posted on September 26, 2012 by Tolrendordm

This month’s RPG Blog Carnival is over at Dice Monkey, and takes on the topic of RPG play in established settings!

So what do we get out of established settings that make them appealing, or not!? Well the first answer is perhaps shared knowledge. All you DM’s out there know how hard it can be to get your players to be interested in the little details you’ve created for your world, over and above crushing the next monster and stealing its gold; so if there is a shared base of knowledge because the setting is widely known, this can help tremendously – the DM does not have to expend as much energy painting a picture of the dazzling attractions of the city at the end of the dangerous trail when that city is for example, Waterdeep of the Forgotten Realms. Chances are that at least one player has read some of the gazillions of novels, or played with other groups in that world. The Star Wars setting is perhaps the ultimate example of making use of this – taking place in a well-defined setting that almost every gamer (and most non-gamers) worth his salt knows well, thanks to the two generations of world-renowned films!

Another attraction of a shared setting is the possibility of interacting with a well-known story. Who wouldn’t want, as a player, to be part of the War of the Ring in Middle-Earth, or fight the Galactic Empire across the galaxy, or indulge in the politics and violence of the Game of Thrones? As a DM as well, settings based on fantasy literature or media provide the attraction of setting your own tales in amongst the famous stories that everyone knows and loves (!?). Some settings have been entirely and deliberately based on this premise, for example the Dragonlance series published by TSR in the 1980s was a grand Adventure Path that explored the world of Krynn alongside the story told in the best-selling novel series by Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weiss. In this case, the intention was that players would even use the same characters as the novels. I remember DMing this series and enjoying it tremendously – I even think I banned my players from reading the novels so they wouldn’t obtain spoilers! Another time, I ran a series of adventures based around the original Icewind Dale novels, featuring Drizzt, Bruenor Battlehammer et al, some of the most famous cross-over RPG characters in history.

Other famous TSR (and now Wizards…) settings such as Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms, and modern offerings such as Paizo’s Golarion and Kobold Press’ Midgard are intended as shared ‘sandbox’ settings, providing background material and adventures to help the DM, and possibly a common setting for organized play programmes, but with no expectation on the actual stories and adventures that a particular group will run. The wealth of material available here can become almost bewildering, and this leads to one of the problems associated with such settings: canon! For example, a setting such as the Forgotten Realms has now been published as a core setting in four versions of Dungeons and Dragons, along with countless novels, adventures and sourcebooks, let alone the years of organized play in the The Living Forgotten Realms! There can hardly be a D&D player alive that hasn’t heard of the setting and its most famous characters, and a significant percentage must have played in the world. What happens then when a DM’s own story, set within the Forgotten Realms, goes agains the perceived ‘real’ history of the world as per the published works. Is that allowed? How do players handle that? 🙂

So where does TolrendorDM stand on this subject? The truth is, I’m a sucker for settings! World-building, with all that entails, is the biggest source of enjoyment that I get out of the game. Up until my hiatus from the game in the early 1990s, I’d probably bought almost every setting published by TSR: Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Krynn, Dark Sun, Planescape, Lankhmar… the list goes on. Since coming back into the hobby with 4E, I’ve been more judicious. I still however, had to have the 4E Forgotten Realms sourcebook, and bought the Dark Sun books because I liked the way they were bringing out the specific flavour of that setting with 4E mechanics. Wolfgang Baur’s Midgard Campaign Setting also encompasses a number of projects I’ve been a backer on.

But in reality, I seldom actually play in these settings. The clue is partly in the name of this blog. Primarily, in all of my gaming, I’m the DM (and chief world-builder) of Tolrendor, my own personal setting, ‘established’ now for almost 30 years 🙂 Over time, it has changed and morphed according to my gaming needs, and I borrow liberally from other settings to enrich my own ideas. Right now, my Heroic Tier 4E campaign for my kids is based in the Nentir Vale mini-setting, as it was a quick way to get started with a rich town and surrounding campaign area – but the region is fully integrated into the northern regions of my own world. This works best for me I think – I get the benefit of the published material, but I get to pull it apart and use the information I want to without feeling like I’m losing my creation 🙂

So, there’s my contribution to the Carnival – I look forward to digesting all the other great ideas out there on this topic!

Posted in D&D Nostalgia, RPG Blog Carnival, World Building | 1 Comment

Midgard Goodies

Posted on September 24, 2012 by Tolrendordm

This post almost made it as my Tech Talk column of the month, or my Map of the Month … but in the end it stands on it’s own 🙂

The Midgard Campaign Setting is the upcoming product from Open Design (now Kobold Press) that brings the whole world of Zobeck to your gaming table! I admit to a certain amount of bias, as I’m a backer of this project, and have been (via Kickstarter) for a number of recent Open Design/Midgard projects, but I can’t think of any game design company at the moment that has as much verve and momentum as the ‘small but fierce’ kobolds lead by Wolfgang Baur!

Even so, it was a surprise to see them coming out with an iPad app! The Midgard Atlas is a simple little app that brings the splendour of Jonathan Roberts cartography to your tablet – along with clickable icons of some major cities that bring up a zoomable city map, and even some drifting clouds 🙂

All in all, its a neat little app. There is no background information, so its little more than a gimmick from an actual play perspective, and some people might find the $3.99 price a bit steep on that score (only compared to the content of other apps on the store – I certainly don’t think its an unreasonable price), but it’s a cool little gimmick, and worthy of the kobolds!

It will be interesting to see how (and if) this develops once the campaign setting is out!

Posted in Cartography, RPG Technology | 4 Comments

RPG Tech Talk: ORP and the Die (or Dice…)

Posted on September 20, 2012 by Tolrendordm

In the July RPG Tech Talk column, I talked about the concept of the Open Roleplaying Platform, or ORP. Briefly, this is the concept of a suite of software tools that together form a viable platform for computer assisted table-top roleplaying. A key feature of such a platform is that it is ‘Open’ ,and that multiple products could be offered to provide various components of the system, unlike the all-or-nothing approach of current products.

So what does this mean in practice? Well, let’s take a look one classic requirement (or use case, as we say in the trade…):

Rolling dice is a key component of any game, whether it is the simple classic six-sided die used in a game of Snakes and Ladders, or the combinations of polyhedral dice and ‘modifiers’ used in many table-top role playing games. In essence, dice are a tried and trusted method of introducing chance into our games.

In software terms, ‘rolling’ a die is pretty simple – simply producing a random number between 1 and n, where n is the number of sides. You can achieve that in at most a couple of lines of code in most modern computer languages. In roleplaying terms however, there are a multitude of modes in which such functionality might be used:

  • Dice roll entry: a gaming group might still want to physically roll their own dice (let’s be honest, this is one of the most enjoyable actions RPGs, as your damage dice clatter across the game table…), but they want to utilise computer tools for other aspects of the game (e.g. Combat and damage tracking). All they need is a simple utility app to enter the results of their roll.
  • Virtual rolling: in lots of cases you might want the software to hide the actual roll. For example, if you have an initiative tracking app, you might want simply to click once to roll initiative (including modifiers) for combatants in the encounter, and have them magically sort into the correct order!
  • Snazzy Dice Rollers: there are a plethora of lovely 3d dice rollers out there that can simulate the physics of dice rolling (e.g. check-out the Apple App store). You might want to use such an app on a iPad at your gaming table, but have the results automatically appear in your Combat Manager app.

There are many more possibilities I’m sure, but I think you get the point: in each case,  what is required us consistent – the game rules require a die, or a group of dice, to be rolled and produce a result; however the how and where are markedly different.

In enterprise software, a service implies a contract to provide certain functionality, but allows for significantly different implementations to be provided that can be used seamlessly by a client application. So here, we have the concept of a Dice Service.

This is of course similar to the concept of the interface vs the implementation in object-oriented languages (C++, Java etc), but the key difference in enterprise software development is the potential to integrate service implementations across different  language and OS platforms, as well as different physical or network locations. It also allows flexible choices to be utilised in the client application. For example, a GM might want all the dice rolls for his monsters to be generated automatically, whilst all his players’ rolls are conducted via real dice rolls, with a smartphone-based entry app. Because the Dice Service contract provides identical results for the client app, regardless of which implementation is used, this can be easily provided as a selectable option.

Another advantage of a well-defined service model is the potential for the growth of a community of service providers. As a developer, my primary experience is in server-side enterprise software architecture using Java – I’m unlikely to turn my efforts to a 3d simulated physics dice roller – but there are plenty of developers out there who can (and have!). If they can be persuaded to implement the ORP Dice Service contract, suddenly there’s another great addition to the platform.

Next time, we’ll take a look at other potential services in the ORP!!

Posted in Columns, RPG Tech Talk, RPG Technology | Leave a comment

Map of the Month: Earlsdale Interactive Map

Posted on September 18, 2012 by Tolrendordm

This month’s Map of the Month column is another call-out to one of the awesome maps that are available out there on the internet. Grimur Fjeldsted is a cartographer that may be known to CC3 users, as his site MapVentures is linked from the Websites link on the main page. Here you can find many great maps produced using the Profantasy suite of tools.

However, I just came across this site a couple of days ago and had to share it! It is a beautiful interactive map implemented in Flash, allowing you to pan, zoom, select various views (political, trade etc), as well as highlight key locations to display an information box. Very cool – and almost became my RPG Tech Talk column 🙂 Check it out by clicking the image below:

Posted in Cartography, Columns, Map of the Month, RPG Technology | 2 Comments

RPG Tech Talk: An e-Module Kickstarter

Posted on August 30, 2012 by Tolrendordm

A few months back I talked about the potential of the new iBooks format for RPG publications – and in fact how I was a little underwhelmed by the iBooks Author software.

Well, now it seems that there is an interesting Kickstarter Project by Mike Bohlmann of bySwarm.com to try this out for real! There is a ‘Proof-of-Concept’ iBook that can be loaded to your iPad for a look at some of the interactive concepts that he intends to use – check it out! I especially liked the potential use of a widget displaying interactive web content using HTML 5! This opens up lots of cool possibilities.

Although I don’t use Pathfinder or the setting portrayed in the proposed adventure, I’m pretty sure I’m going to back this project as I can follow along with some of the technical ideas 🙂

Posted in Columns, RPG Tech Talk, RPG Technology | 1 Comment

Content Corner: Havenscoast Locales

Posted on August 13, 2012 by Tolrendordm

Content Corner LogoIt’s been a slow couple of months on the blog front – a combination of work and summer holidays to blame – things just haven’t been progressing as I’d like! The ‘Havenscoast Project‘ is one such example; the last time I published anything on this was back in February!

Finally this month I have completed an update of the Havencoast Gazetteer, with an expansion of the original overview to include more detailed descriptions of the key map locations. I always love this part of a source-book – reading  the passages and then flipping back to the map often to locate them and get a feel for the world or region! This always generates lots of adventure ideas to float around in the back of my brain! All I can hope is that it has the same effect on my readers 🙂

Havenscoast Gazetteer PDF

Posted in 4E D&D, Area Map B4: The Havenscoast, Columns, Content Corner, Self-publishing, The Havenscoast Project, Tolrendor Gazetter | 12 Comments

DM for Kids: Holiday Packing

Posted on July 24, 2012 by Tolrendordm

Yay, its the summer holidays, and the kids are now off school. We’re off on holiday at the end this week, and obviously we hope the weather is going to be such that beaches and swimming are the main order of the day, rather than role-playing games…

However, we live in the UK, and we’re off to Devon (in the south-west of England), so what is the chance of that?? For anyone reading this that has experienced the UK ‘summer’ so far, I think you know what I’m talking about (although having said that, today it’s 30 degrees…)! So it’s as well to be prepared for all seasons, and that means packing the games!

So, as a DM Dad, what’s on my holiday packing list for the wet weather?? We have a cottage booked, so I can take some kit – it doesn’t all have to be ‘TOTM’ 🙂

Apart from the ubiquitious pack of cards, and a few  standard favourites (Monopoly, Connect 4, Dread Pirates etc), Castle Ravenloft is definitely making it into the car. One compact box and you’ve got everything you need for a decent evening’s D&D like entertainment. Even my wife will have a go 🙂 As an added bonus, you get some minis and tiles that might be useful for a gaming session!

I’ve also promised the kids that we can get a few sessions of D&D in as well, as school and work scheduling over the last few months has definitely got in the way of our game. So, what to pack here, given that I’ll be a long way from my gaming bookshelf and standard tools. Luckily we’re in the middle of a dungeon delve which is already pretty well prepped, so I guess I’ll need:

  • Rules Compendium – all I need in a single compact volume! Anything that’s not here can be easily hand-waved if I can’t remember it!
  • Character sheets – don’t take up much space, and I still use the old off-line Character Builder for my kids’ characters, we can level-up on my laptop if required!
  • Dice – guess I could use a dice roller on my iPad, but nothing beats the phyiscal version, and after all, they don’t take up much space!
  • Minis – hmm, this is a tougher one – breakables alert! 🙂 However, we only really have the kids’ characters (and menagerie…) as actual figures, and I use tokens (generally printed on cardstock) for monsters, so should be fine.
  • Maps – I generally create my maps in CC3 and print them to scale for battle-maps. Obviously I won’t be lugging the colour printer on holiday! I could use tiles (in fact the current adventure has tile-based maps) but tbh I find them bulky and fiddly. My plan is to print the required maps out in advance, glue the sheets onto A2 paper, and take them rolled up in a tube.
  • Adventure info – all available already in the ‘Cloud’ (www.dropbox.com) and on my laptop (just must remember to sync before I go …).

All sounds great so far, but realistically I’ve only got a couple of sessions pre-prepped, so what happens after that? Well, I’ve been blogging about game table tech, so here’s my chance to try it out. My plan is to trial d20Pro to ‘share’ a battlemap and tokens. I also might need a few other tools to make this work:

  • Main laptop (Macbook Pro) already has on it all the tools, such as CC3, Microsoft OneNote (which I use for all my campaign information), Character Builder (offline version), token images, image editing programmes etc, to prep some more adventure! 
  • Second laptop – this is soley to run the player version of d20Pro!
  • Internet/Network link – to make this work the 2 PCs obviously need to be linked together. I’m also thinking about internet connectivity for my laptop, as the only tools I might need which are internet dependent is the 4E Compendium and Monster Builder. I’m thinking of getting one of these things!

Hopefully that should see us through a week of wet weather!! I’ll let you know later … 🙂

Posted in Columns, DM for Kids, DnD Next, Roleplaying with Kids, The Amber Tower Campaign | Leave a comment