As many of you may or may not know, I've been developing a hack for 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons predicated on giving it an old school feel. You can check out the open development process here at my other blog. It has been a lot of work, a lot of tinkering, and lastly a lot of fun as a mental exercise. One thing about the development though, was that is was just that, a mental exercise. I've yet to playtest these ideas, if my two (almost three) month hiatus is any indicator. Frankly, I've been in Europe busy beyond my wildest imagination (with some fun naturally thrown in as well) and have not had time for D&D or even Legend4ry. This has to change! And it will. I have all of the rules changes for the hack worked out, as you can see at the Legend4ry D&D development blog linked above, it's just a matter of compiling it in a sexy pdf format. I'm going to make an effort this week to have it posted for download on both of my blogs by then end of this week. I know, I know, empty promises that have been heard before? I apologize as it is true. But this time will be different, I swear.
One of the biggest challenges I've faced is making a creative/memorable piece of cover art. Sadly my Wacom and scanner are back home in the US, so hand/digitally drawing it myself is somewhat out of the question. I have this fantastic little fun vector program called Inkscape, but as awesome as it is, I am limited in what I can do with it. Does anyone out there in Blogger, Twitter, or D&D land have any suggestions for open source pictures, programs, etc?
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In other news, over the month of March (and some of April) I took place in a Fourthcore Team Deathmatch, hosted by C. Stephen Ross from DMG 42. It was a visceral blast! Those of you who have interest in a no-holds barred deathmatch with the 4e ruleset look no further! Sign up today!
I was a part of Team Arkham, consisting of Catwoman, the Joker, and the Red Hood. We competed against two other teams to wrack up the most kills and keep our own kill count to a minimum. It was exactly how it sounds, fast and deadly. We played via the FTDM site via posts in the comments below each round as Ross updated the pictures of the map religiously after each post. Hats off to that man for, as he himself put it, "juggling cats." We ended up playing the Mortal Kombat stage and finished second over-all. Not to shabby, especially as it was my first time with FTDM. I definitely learned a few lessons for next time, specifically that the Essentials line is great, but not necessarily as well-suited for FTDM in that most attacks do straight damage and not much else.
I look forward to murdering and getting murdered again in my next FTDM encounter!
Currently, I've been invited to partake in the Lost Crown of Tesh-Naga play-by-post game and I couldn't be more excited. It's nice being able to scratch that D&D itch from across the pond!
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And lastly, I've consumed with rapid pace A Game of Thrones and am also destroying A Clash of Kings currently. Both great books and I'm shocked it took me this long to get into them. I feel like one of those guys who was only brought into the series via the HBO show (which has a great first season... the second season leaves me confused with the shift in pace and all that is left out...) That said, I'm happy I have gotten into the books finally after watching my dad devour them in the 90s.
Until next time!
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Glad to hear that you had such a good time with FTDM and that you're stoked for LCTN. Your group's run of Tesh-Naga will likely be the last time I run it in 4E, so I'll be putting it up pretty publicly on DMG 42 so that everyone who's been through the adventure before you can spectate and see the plot unravel!
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