A plan for the future

Don’t bother the kids while the GM is narrating!

It’s been over a year since we started this blog, and frankly I was running out of steam. We have a new plan in which we will be updating the site on Mondays, with a different guy from our group posting every week! It’s not like the gaming world has stood still since my last post, so let me bring you up to date with Skyland Games happenings.

First off, ACE was a really great time! There were tons of comic vendors, people dressed up in costumes, and bunch of people having a great time gaming! I think the best thing in the gaming corner was the 12 and under kids table, featuring the Pathfinder Beginner Box run by Venture Captain Paul Trani! The fantastic guys at The Wyvern’s Tale gave each kid a set of RPG dice just for participating! I sincerely hope we created some life-long gamers at the event. It is great to have the veteran grey-beard gamers with all the years of gaming experience and wisdom that comes with them, but in the age of pervasive video games and a million other distractions, it is increasingly important for us to recruit the next generation of gamers. According to RPG Research, things seem to be moving in the right direction.

Next, the Asheville Pathfinder Lodge is flourishing! We have an awesome one year anniversary event planned. The lodge will be running several different tiers of Blood Under Absalom, a special Pathfinder Society module that can usually only be run at big cons, since it requires five simultaneous tables of players all running through the same encounters at the same time! I played through it at SCARAB last year, and it was one of the coolest RPG events I’ve ever been a part of. If you are anywhere near western North Carolina, be sure and sign up at the warhorn to reserve your seat at the table!

Also, some of the guys from our group attended MACE down in Charlotte and had an excellent time playing Pathfinder Society scenarios and checking out the vendor area. More details to follow in a later post.

I recently ran a DCCRPG game, in which we modified the character creation rules significantly. One of the chief complaints from my players about Dungeon Crawl Classics is that due to the strict character creation process (3d6 for stats in order, 1d4 hit points) the PCs in the game feel very fragile, and aren’t generally very good at any particular skill or stat. To make our heroes more, err, heroic we made the follow adjustments dubbing it the DCC Champion character creation rules: Roll 5d6 for stats, take the highest 3 numbers showing for each attribute. Choose a race/class rather than rolling. Rearrange your stats so your high rolls can be in key attributes for your race/class. Start at level 1 with maximum hit points based on the hit die for your class (4+HD). We played through about half of People of the Pit and while it was less lethal than the Rules As Written, it was still very challenging, but the PCs seemed more effective at their chosen professions. No more 12 Intelligence wizards! That being said, I’m still on the fence about whether it is better to have a PC with very average stats, that survives by wit, cunning, and that fickle mistress luck, or in the interest of heroes being heroic, its more fun to nudge the bell-curve in the players favor. I think to each there own, and as long as you have fun, everybody wins.

In D&D news, the latest edition of encounters looks like they are transitioning away from 4e and allowing players to try D&Dnext as part of a public playtest. Players and DMs still need to sign up for the playtest to participate, but players who want to try it out and haven’t signed up yet can play one of the pre-gens. I met the guys that make up Skyland Games at a D&D encounters game several years ago, and the program has its merits, but just doesn’t fit my schedule right now. I am thrilled to see WotC break open the TSR vaults and reprint some old classics, but with DCCRPG being very compatible with old modules with very little conversion, I’m much more likely to run them with DCC than with 1e or DnDnext.

On the magazine front, there is some sad news, as well as hope that the torch has been passed to a worthy successor. The magazine Kobold Quarterly is no more. This will allow the staff to focus on producing awesome game supplements and adventures, but it is a sad day to see the scion of the print versions of Dragon and Dungeon magazines end. As one door closes, another opens: Gygax Magazine looks to carry the banner as a print RPG magazine. Clash of Echoes has an excellent interview with Luke Gygax, one of the creators of the magazine and son of the late E. Gary Gygax. With the new magazine comes the resurrection of the TSR name, but not THAT TSR. This is a totally different TSR. It appears as though the magazine is starting under a bit of controversy as Grognardia points out, the magazine is starting without the blessing from the Gygax estate. We’ll see how it all pans out.