Artificer's Intuition

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...

It's been a long time since I've utilized this blog, and instead of trying to start a new blog and start fresh, I wanted to continue the things I've started many, many years ago. There are plenty of thoughts and ideas in my mind, and this is as good a forum as any to discuss them for others to read. While I've been playing and DMing a lot of 5e, I wanted to start with some other projects I've been thinking of and start conversations about that. 4 th Edition (4e) was the start to my love of Dungeons & Dragons, yet has largely been un-played since the inception of the 5e playtest. I remember being initially skeptical of 5e coming out and replacing 5e, only to embrace it wholeheartedly once the first public playtests became available. I think one of the biggest struggles my friends had with 4e was that I purchased most of the books, and other players rarely showed up to the table prepared. With all the powers most of the classes had in 4e, being unpre...