25 Years Ago...

I forgot about this one. This is one of the monthly free adventures WotC would post on their website. It's called The Alchemist's Eyrie , for 6th- or 7th-level characters. Once again, it's a dwarven thing. A dwarven tower, specifically, where the party is on a fetch quest. It doesn't use the Map-a-Week maps for December, though. And it turns out that the tower is currently occupied by renegade dwarves who are also...wererats. Remember in older editions where only humans could be lycanthropes? Welcome to 3rd edition, where anyone can be anything. There really isn't a lot to this adventure; as I said, it's a fetch quest. The goal is to find some medicine for a contagious illness threatening the nearby dwarven stronghold. It turns out that the dwarf who has been making the medicine is dead, killed by the wererats who are seeking a way to control the side effects of their lycanthropy. So, the party is going to be fighting some sneaky dwarves in what is a pretty stra...

Alright, this is one of the last things to review this year, which is great since I'm almost out of year. This, as a perusal of the cover will attest, is a Living Greyhawk product. Specifically, it was a free adventure dished out for everyone to use. It's not free now, of course; this sucker runs over $50 on Noble Knight games. I'll get it later. But I was able to find a PDF copy so I can review it. So, this is an adventure for four 1st-level characters. It takes place in the Theocracy of the Pale, so your clerics are going to have fun getting along with the Pholtus-worshipping people. Yeah. Plus, if you didn't live in Northern California or Nevada, you weren't actually supposed to play in the Pale. So I'm not sure how many people used this as an actual Living Greyhawk  game. For myself, I would have ignored the whole regional thing anyway. But I'm contrary that way. Anyway, on to the adventure. Actually, the first half of this 32-page module covers the syn...

So, to close out the month's Map-a-Week set, we have the Sacred Caverns . This is the last of the dwarven caverns that I didn't get a chance to populate this month. It's quite the lengthy complex, isn't it? I'm going to have to come back to this; January won't be as crazy as December was, I hope. And it will take a bit of time to actually find all the numbers; they aren't in any particular order. Those four big rooms on the top right are numbered as 1, 7, 12, and 18. So, no rhyme or reason to the numbering on this one.

Okay, so remember that Arena map that I posted last month from the Map-a-Week archive? Well, there was something attached to that map: The D&D Fight Club . I wrote about it at the end of November. Now, we get some of the participants. And by 'some', I mean seven of them. Most of them are dated in the online archive as 'January 1st, 2000', which obviously isn't correct since the 3rd edition rules weren't out at that time. The only one dated for December is the first one: Kum'hokh, the bugbear wereboar sorcerer/priest of Hruggek . Yeah, that's the sort of thing they're creating with this ruleset. There are three versions of this guy: a CR 4 2nd-level sorcerer, a CR 9 Sor2/Clr3/Wereboar, and a CR 12 Sor2/Clr6/Wereboar. He's also got a weasel familiar as well as his own private horde of dwarf-fighting goblins. Even though this is supposed to be about this Fight Club, we still get a way to incorporate this guy into a normal campaign. If 'norm...

I'm running out of month, aren't I? Ah, well. December is always a crazy time of year. Here are a couple of online additions from the WotC archives to add to our collection of 3e goodness. First, we have an old favorite, the  Aurumvorax . This is a cat-like beastie that eats gold (the name aurumvorax is Latin for 'gold eater'. It first appeared in the old Monster Manual II  in 1983. No, wait...it first appeared earlier than that. It was one of the new creatures introduced in the old Expedition to the Barrier Peaks  module from 1980. That module was full of them; there were twelve new creatures that first appeared in that adventure, but they weren't given full writeups. You had to dig through the text to find most of them. Anyway, the aurumvorax also starred in an Ecology article in the late 1980s in Dragon Magazine, and was also statted out in the 2nd edition Monstrous Manual . So, it has a long and distinguished pedigree in the game. Here, it is a Small Magical Bea...

Yeah, this one is well-named. Today's Map-a-Week is simply called Complex . And I should have noticed this before, but this month's theme is a dwarven stronghold, which definitely fits with this month's Dragon magazine theme (dwarves, remember?) So, this is all about the dwarves.

Sorry about the delay in posting; it's been a crazy week of work. But I'm going to post as much as I can before the end of the month when I get a chance. So much for lots of extra time to fill in the maps... Anyway, this Cliffhanger was actually on December 4th, so I'm a couple of weeks late on posting it. Better late than never. This one is called The Candlemaker's Fire. It's another four-parter, and comes with a bonus monster at the end. It's for 4th-level characters, and at least one of them should have a +1 weapon. I would expect that most 4th-level characters would, especially in 3rd edition. Alright, so this one begins in the village of Travensburg, which we saw in the first Cliffhanger, Unearthing the Past . There's an enchanter who has settled near the village and has been amusing himself by selling candles. Most of them are simply high-quality scented candles, the kind you'd find at the dollar store. But he also included some minor enchantments ...

Alright, this is a continuation of the last Map-a-Week, apparently. And they are calling this the Deeper Levels . I'm not sure how the two maps are connected, though. There are no staircases on the larger of the two maps that I can see, which makes it tough to connect them. I'm not up to stocking this tonight; I'm just posting the map for now. It's been a very long week, and my creative brain is telling me to take a break. So, I'll leave it at this for now and come back to it when I have a chance.

Okay, this is a bit of a different accessory/adventure. In fact, it's a Fast-Play Game, which means it's a self-contained thing that allows people to just up and play it without any other books. Not even the Player's Handbook . At first, I thought this might be related to the D&D Adventure Boxed Set that came out alongside the Player's Handbook  back in August, but no, it's a standalone. Everything you need to play is included except people to play with, pencils, and dice (six-siders only; no polyhedral dice needed). So, this is a 'find out how this game works through play' booklet that was offered for free back in December 2000. It's a very stripped-down version of the game, suitable for absolute beginners and kids. Experienced players probably wouldn't have wanted anything to do with this unless they were completist collectors. Guilty as charged. But I don't have this physically yet; this 'free' game now costs upwards of $60 US for...

Welcome to the last official D&D magazine of 2000. I know there were some unofficial ones (Alarums & Excursions was still running back then), but if I tried to get into all of those, this would take a hundred years. So, Polyhedron #145 starts with a note that The Fright of Tristor  is in the mail. It was a free, member-exclusive adventure which I will look at later; I don't have a physical copy, at least not yet, but I'll get it eventually. Membership dues in the RPGA are rising (damn inflation!), and it costs $10 US to order official RPGA scenarios. There are conversions for the Living Death and Living Jungle campaigns coming as well; I assume those would be free for everyone. Then there's some news from different parts of the world talking about what's going on in the various RPGA campaigns. Letters to the Editor are next; the Polyhedron column doesn't have a fancy name like Scale Mail or Out on a Limb. Nothing of note here, except for the guy whose copy c...

Okay, let's finish this dwarf-heavy magazine and see what else is inside, shall we? The next article isn't about dwarves; it's about the 2000 Dungeons & Dragons  movie, including casting information and spoilers about the plot. Oh, and there's an interview with Lee Arenberg, who played...Elwood the Dwarf in the movie. They just can't get away from that theme, can they? So, I did watch this movie in theaters, and it was rather disappointing. Jeremy Irons got extreme indigestion from chewing all that scenery, and even the main characters were just...meh. The climactic battle was early CGI, with tons of dragons, so you can imagine how that looked on screen. Still, it was a D&D movie, something we had been craving for nearly twenty years. I think a Dragonlance  movie would have worked better, but considering they were playtesting 3rd edition even while filming the movie, I'm not surprised they did something completely different. We get a synopsis of the movi...

Alright, the last Dragon Magazine of the year 2000, and as you can see from the cover, this is a dwarf-centric issue. Multiple articles about dwarves, so let's dive right in, shall we? And right off the bat, I discover that someone actually cut a page out of this magazine. Or maybe two. Yes, it's two; the first page is the table of contents, which is actually page 5. All I'm missing is the initial ad for a Dragonlance book, as well as the unlettered cover art page. Too bad. Still, I have the rest of the magazine; it doesn't look like any other ads were cut out. At least, I hope not. So, a quick look at the TOC shows no fewer than eight articles about dwarves here. Well, that's certainly thematic. But they don't start until page 40, so we've got a ways to go before we get to them. The first thing is Dave Gross' editorial, which of course is about dwarves. Specifically, 'reinventing' them. Well, I suppose not everyone wants to play a Gimli clone. I...

I know, I know...I said I'd be starting the next Dragon Magazine. Well, it's Sunday, which means it's Map-a-Week time, so we'll go with that. Our map is...actually, we've got four things on this one. The actual map is a two-in-one deal: It's literally labeled as Two Maps in One , but it's also noted as being two shoreline maps. Here it is: As you can see, this is a busy map with lots of rooms and stuff happening. In fact, there's so much going on that they provided a Master Key to explain all the symbols: Like I said, lots going on. And we also get a new Legend to list off all the cool stuff that we put in the map ourselves: 44 rooms is a lot, isn't it? So, this is a hefty mapping week. I've done a quick check, and it doesn't appear that this map gets used in any adventures released this month, so I'm going to stock the top level (the bottom one on the map) tonight; I'll get to the next level later, I hope. There are 13 numbered roo...

Alright, let's wrap this up. This time for sure. The next section is on Selecting an Alignment. Not really something I think is necessary, but maybe for newbies who don't understand alignments it might be okay. Basically, it's like those online quizzes that ask you a bunch of questions and then tell you what Star Trek character you are. Except that it tells you what your character's alignment would be. The questionnaire covers relationship to family, to friends, to community, and to king and country, as well as your character's thoughts on crime and punishment, and business and the economy. Oh, and there are bonus essay questions if you really want to dig into your character's motivation. Frankly, as a writer I don't put that much detail into figuring out a character's alignment; I just write and let it come out naturally. But for some people, this might be fun. It's not for me, so I'm not going to score the quiz for Relgar. Besides, he's alr...

Alright, let's wrap this puppy up and move on. The next section is 'Creating Your Personal History'. This is basically a set of random tables that will give your character a full-on background complete with home, family, training, life events, and relationships. The home communities are race-based; dwarves roll on a different table than halflings, for example. Strangely, the terrain part of the home climate section is not race-based; your elf could roll 'desert' as his home terrain, for example, which would be odd. But, sometimes random oddities are fun. Your character's family is next, and you start off by rolling for your family's economic status. I love the idea of a half-orc rolling 'wealthy' on this table. Although 'wealthy' in this context isn't that impressive. Social standing comes next, and you could actually roll a combination of 'wealthy' and 'slave', which would be hilarious. How well can your family defend the...

Alright, let's move on to the next section, which is easily the largest in the book, taking almost half of the page count. This is the Race & Class section. It starts off with some archetype personality traits for each of the core races; dwarves are dour, heart, stalwart and focused, while halflings are quick, sneaky, acquisitive, and aware. Nothing too world-bending here. The next bit gives the ability modifiers for each race, but also includes what those changes actually do for each race, which is a nice touch. For example, the elf has +2 Dex and -2 Con, which gives the character a +1 AC, +1 attack with ranged weapons, and -1 hp per level. Gnomes, meanwhile, have +2 Con and -2 Str, so they get +1 hp per level, -1 attack and damage in melee, and reduced carrying capacity. This is a good way to help new players visualize what the different races will actually look like in game play. Excellent inclusion. Next we get the race-class combinations. After you've chosen your race,...

Welcome to December! This is the last month of the year, obviously, so once I'm done with these products, that will be everything that WotC did for 3rd edition D&D in the year 2000. Not a bad collection of stuff, I'd say. There aren't a lot of products this month, either; there's a Dragon magazine, a Polyhedron, and the Hero Builder's Guidebook . There were two other things that I don't have physical copies of: Caves of Shadow , which looks like something that goes along with the D&D Adventure Game Box Set , and The Fright at Tristor , an RPGA module for Living Greyhawk. I couldn't afford to get them just yet, so they'll have to wait until after Christmas for me to get physical copies. In the meantime, though, we have this lovely tome. Now, I've seen mixed reviews of it. Veteran players considered it pretty worthless for the most part, while beginners thought it was great. Let's take a look and see which side is right, or if it falls some...