Does anyone here remember the anti-D&D hysteria of the 1980s?

Well, not me - I got started with gaming in 1990. But over on RPGNet there is a thread with scanned newspaper articles from a Canadian town where this became a hot issue.

My favorite quote is this one:

"Also, the fact that it's mostly boys and men that show greatest interest in the game is an important consideration, for they are the future leaders of our country. Should we not be careful what we feed into their minds?"

I've just posted a lengthy essay on how to deal with sociopathic player characters over at ENWorld. You might find it interesting.

After I posted a blog entry on ENWorld, I triggered a debate in which D&D 3.5 fan basically accuse D&D 4E of being "unrealistic".

...

No, really.

Yesterday I noticed with delight that ENWorld has a new blog feature. I immediately started a blog of my own there. Two of my posts there are reviews of Exalted and GURPS Space. These concentrate on what these books have to offer to people who play D&D first and foremost, and I plan to write more reviews like them.

If you have an ENWorld account, please feel free to give these reviews good ratings. I'd love to be the first person who shows up in the "Best Entries" column for the ENWorld blogs... :D

Killjoy Cooking With the Dungeons & Dragons Crowd

"I'm so mad that there's a new edition of The Better Joy Cookbook out. Thanks for making my old copy obsolete, you greedy hacks! For five years now, my friends have been coming over for my eggplant Parmesan, and now I'm never going to be able serve it again unless I shell out 35 bucks for the latest version."

I think he nails it.

Ever since the announcement of D&D 4E, gaming forums have been gone crazy with rampant speculations, rumors, hearsay, and denouncement of every single snippet of information that has been presented about the new edition. A large number of gamers have already made up their minds that they are never going to buy this new edition - without ever actually having seen the new rules.

But really, we have been here before. Let me show a small selection of Usenet posts (does anyone here remember Usenet) from rec.games.frp.dnd, around September in the year 1999 - more than half a year before the publication of D&D 3E.

( Walking down memory lane... )

You might see why I am experiencing a strong sense of deja vu at the moment

Well, it seems like Gleemax, the new online gaming community thingie from Wizards of the Coast, is online. It is still in alpha testing though, so some clunkiness and bugs should be expected.

Personally, I will probably spend quite some time there because this looks like a good opportunity to plug Urbis some more to d20 gamers - especially the blog feature (though I won't put much original material there because WotC effectively owns the content according to their terms of use, and instead focus on more general ramblings and thoughts).

My first blog entry can be found here

Recently, I've been involved in a larger effort to bring Urbis to a greater audience. You can see the results here:

Urbis on Eruvian

Eruvian.Com is a great tool for building collaborative campaign settings, and in cooperation with the creators of the website I recently uploaded pretty much all material there is for Urbis to it. To my mind, this has several advantages:

- It gives Urbis greater exposure. The membership of Eruvian.Com is rising fast, and is expected to continue to do so in the future. More people becoming aware of Urbis can only be a good thing.

- It allows those who prefer to read campaign settings on websites to do so. Yes, I know I said that I won't develop the Urbis website further when I published the latest PDF, but I am willing to make the effort to maintain both for this system.

- It allows readers to individually review parts of the setting and thus give me the valuable feedback I crave. So use the "review" option early and often!

- It allows fans to create their own setting material for Urbis and submit it for other fans to see and use, right next to the "official" material.

- It might allow me to subcontract writing supplements for Urbis!

I've created a number of content requests for Urbis, which you can see by clicking the "View Content Requests" on the navigation column on the left. All of these represent possibilities for Urbis supplements. Furthermore, I have created submission guidelines at both the main "Urbis locale" and the sublocales I am interested in expanding.

At the moment, the kinds of submissions that interest me the most are "Urban Tales" adventure seeds (again, take a look at the main locale for submission guidelines). Since these adventure seeds would be systemless, they could be released before D&D 4E and Urbis itself are published. My current plan is to choose the 50 best submissions or so and publish them as a PDF. Contributors would get name recognition in the publication and a free copy (note that you still own the rights to any submissions to Eruvian.Com, so I have to ask your permission to use them first).

But, of course, these adventure seeds are not the only possible expansion to the setting. And if someone produces consistently high-quality material, I might ask him or her to write and organize material for an entire supplement (such as a sourcebook on a particular city), as well as converting it from material on a website into a workable manuscript suitable for publication as a PDF. Such authors would also get a cut of the profit for the sales of the product (while those who contributed minor parts of the text would again receive name credit and a free copy of the final product)!

Well, so much for my ideas at the moment. Take a look at Eruvian.Com and tell me what you think!

This is the most overblown melodramatic reaction to the announcement of D&D 4E which I have seen so far:

"the way they have handled d&d and this new edition has made me give up any hasbro product.

i have this nagging sense of betrayal at the hands of a corporate entity that cares more about grabbing cash than the game or the fans.

so, after 23 years, after being brought into gaming with d&d, im quitting d&d. and im not alone.

so from now on my dollars and devotion go to smaller, more deserving game companies that put the fans, and the game first."

You have to ask if he has a "nagging sense of betrayal" every time he buys something to eat, too...


But I am sure that there are even more melodramatic reactions to the announcement to D&D 4E. Know of any? Post them here.

From the horse's mouth:

"The OGL will not require a fee.

We have discussed a fee based license for the d20 system trademark but fees are not a guarantee of getting only quality publishers. Nothing as been decided yet and there are many options on the table including a hand selected group using the d20 STL or none and just having everyone use OGL. Our seminar at Gencon will help to shape our thoughts on this."

I guess that makes it official. Good thing, too.

robin_d_laws has the following to say about the chief designers of D&D 4E:

At dinner, any concerns I might have about WotC screwing the pooch on the new D&D are 100% allayed by the news that the lead designer is none other than my boon compadre Rob Heinsoo. Whenever I’ve asked him what he’s working on over the last year plus, Rob has responded with this peculiar spasm of guilt, then mumbled something about new collectible projects. Now that I know what he couldn’t tell me it all makes sense. I absolutely trust that Rob knows what needs to be done to make the game faster and easier to run, while still hitting the pleasure centers of D&D fans everywhere, and has the design moxy to implement the vision. I am also very heartened to hear that Mike Mearls is on board as developer and James Wyatt is steering the story team.

So when asked what I think about the new master plan, I don’t need to lay out one of my usual long-winded, either-or scenarios. All I have to say is: “Heinsoo. Wyatt. Mearls*. It will rock, end of story.”


If he has faith in them, then I, at least, am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

So it appears that there will be a new edition of D&D next year.

Well, I'm not surprised. However, from my point of view the main thing is that 4E apparently _will_ be released under the Open Gaming License - and that means that I can use it for Urbis.

Which is going to be the plan - starting from now. I have my doubts I could manage "officially" release Urbis until the new edition of D&D has been published - and even if I could, what would be the point of doing so for a system that's soon going to be "obsolete" anyway? However, if I manage to release the setting soon after the publication of the OGL, then perhaps I could make a far bigger splash than just another 3.5 setting...

Of course, this means that my priorities now are to concentrate on the non-rules parts of the setting - developing the locales and society as opposed to the rules bits. I might even try out some layout schemes for the final PDF. If all goes well, I might be able to finish the rules parts within a few months of the release of the SRD and then "go to press", so to speak.

Here's hoping.