Artificer's Intuition

 One of the nice things about age is that you reflect on things differently based on your life experiences. You start to realize you're not quite the young teenage Spider-man anymore, but rather the quirky Star-Lord, or even Ant-Man. Such is how I feel discovering 2010's Gamma World, or perhaps rediscovering it. I was already vaguely aware of the game when it was being announced, but I didn't pay much attention to it. For one thing, it was released during that window when 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons released the Dark Sun Campaign Setting (August), the Dark Sun Creature Catalog (end of August - early Sept), then the Essentials products, which included the Dungeon Master's Kit and the Monster Vault. I had gotten into Dungeons and Dragons the spring of 2010, which meant I was playing catch up on a number of volumes (my 4e book collection is still incomplete, but it's mostly the Power Source books, so I'm not that worried). Gamma World was strange. From what ...

I haven't shared any ideas in forever.  I'm quite surprised to see how long ago the last post was, first because I hadn't thought about writing much, second because time seems to have kind of morphed and warped oddly since 2020. I think the break was good, and I'm back to having ideas and things I want to share, so, let's start things off again. I haven't played Dungeons & Dragons, or any other tabletop rpg, in a few years. Crazy statement from someone who was posting ideas and writing about it quite a bit, but it's true. Now, I've spent a lot of time playing other games and examining different gaming hobbies (painting, anyone?), but overall, the entirety of game night planning, getting people together, etc, has fallen by the wayside. There's also a big reason that led to the burnout: 5e is not my favorite way to play D&D. I'd rather stick with the 4e rules system. I know this is somewhat of a controversial opinion, but it's not meant...

An interesting mechanic that caught my eye as I returned to 4e was that of Fortune Cards. As I previously stated in an earlier post, one of the stores by my house still had a few packs of Fury of the Feywild. Those that have read this blog or read my tweets know that I am huge fan of the Feywild and the fey creatures that inhabit that realm, so when I was perusing 4e things from the past, picking up packs of cards with 'Feywild' in the set name was a no-brainer.                                                                                                                        As I tweeted while writing this post, it's amazing to me that despite the Fortune Cards arriving on scene circa ...

Last summer, I spent a few blog posts delving into 4e. Since 5e's inception in spring of 2012, I hadn't revisited much of any of the main 4e concepts, apart from various books that might contain pieces of lore I wanted to revisit. With my deep dive, I took a look at many of the things I had forgotten about. At the height of it all, a friend purchased the Rules Compendium and Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms and we sat down to build characters, utilizing things like Character Themes and even creating Fortune Card decks for our characters. It was a VERY interesting afternoon, as many things came back to me that I had flat out forgotten. Last year, I invested in a few 4e things for my collection. A local store had a few packs of the Fury of the Feywild Fortune Cards, so I spent my time buying the packs to fill my collection. I also purchased the Forgotten Realms Player's Guide in order to have the genasi and swordmage class in print. I figured that I wanted all the race/clas...

As I’ve gone back to dive into the options that are 4e D&D, I took another hard look at something near and dear to my heart: my 4e published article, The Trinket Lord. Published in Dungeon 205 (August 2012), it was another article in the Court of Stars series about the Archfey. With GenCon 2017 occurring right now, I figured it's a good time to talk about such things again.  I had always found the Court of Stars articles extremely intriguing and full of adventure hooks, but when I pitched this article, only two existed, The Prince of Frost (Dragon 374) and the Bramble Queen (Dungeon 185). The Trinket Lord was originally pitched back in April 2012, when WotC accepted article submissions for their Dragon and Dungeon magazines. My contact for the entire process was Greg Bilsland (which was a major “whoa!” moment for me). I consider my relatively short interactions with Greg to have been extremely insightful, as he gave me a good mix of compliments and critiques and helped me ...

In the first installment of my 4e plans, I discussed the book options I was going to give my players, along with my first pass of supplemental content. I received some feedback, which I wanted to address as I continue this creative exercise. One of the comments brought up was about using the Neverwinter Campaign Guide for other themes, only reflavoring them for whatever purpose I wanted to for a Points of Light setting. I was glad to get that feedback, as I had considered Neverwinter (it sits proudly on my bookcase as a source of inspiration), but didn’t open it at all due to thinking the content was too Realms-specific. There are some really solid theme choices, such as the Bre’gan Daer’the Spy, which allows drow the use of choosing a utility power to gain their famous levitation (although this was also stated to be an option for the drow racial utility powers). Taking all the themes in the book, here’s how I’m re-flavoring them to something Nentir Vale appropriate. Others ar...