25 Years Ago...

I lied; there's one more thing on the November list. There's no Map-a-Week for November 30th, but there was an undated file linked to the Arena from last week. This is the introduction to the D&D Fight Club . What is the D&D Fight Club, you ask? Well, apparently there's a rule about not talking about it, but I intend to break that rule quite thoroughly. From what I can see, there have been several articles on the Fight Club prior to this time, but they were not given proper dates, all being set for January 2nd, 2000. Obviously there was no 3rd edition yet except in the playtesting stage and the Countdown articles in Dragon, but these articles must have been coming out at least by August. Still, I've not discussed them yet because they are linked to the Arena map, which didn't arrive until last week. So, I'm going to include those creatures in the December writeups. So, what is this all about, then? Well, it's a way for a DM to set up a fighting tourn...

Okay, so there are a couple of things to get to in the online department before we call it for November. I received my December package today, so that will be fun to go through here. Before I go on, though, I want to thank everyone who has been reading this blog; some people are going all the way to the back, and I'm surprised that the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer  is so popular. Again, thank you; it's nice to know that this project is being seen. Alright, enough of that sentimentality stuff. Let's get to it. There are two more things that were posted in November on the WotC website, so let's go over them. Up first is a series of posts called Realms by Night. I really should have started going over this in August when the first 3e post on the topic went up on the site. But it predates 3rd edition anyway, being started in January as part of the 2nd edition wind-down. The entire series is available on the Forgotten Realms Helps website; the Internet Archive of the series ap...

Alright, let's continue with this and finish off the month's stuff with a bang. December will be much lighter than November, so I'll get to that campaign stuff I wanted to work on this month. But first... The next article in this issue is 'All Over the Map', which is a detailed explanation of how WotC prepares maps for their products (or for the Map-a-Week feature). Their goal for this edition was consistency; 2nd edition did have a lot of different mapping styles depending on the product line, so tightening things up and making a more focused template for mapping was apparently a priority for the design team. I'm fine with that. Their maps don't just include dungeon layouts and wilderness maps; they also include the various examples, combat diagrams and charts that pepper the rule books to illustrate things like cover, attacks of opportunity, and flanking. The design process is pretty well-described, but it's not going to be all that interesting for non...

So, for a few years in the late 90s, Dragon had been producing an additional issue each year, the Dragon Annual. This was the fifth one, and the first one for 3rd edition games. There's plenty here, so let's get right to it. Dave Gross starts us off with an editorial that talks about the new edition, of course. But the most interesting part of the editorial is the invitation for people to send in campaign descriptions of their ultimate fantasy realm that will surpass the Realms and Dragonlance as the Greatest D&D Setting Ever. Yes, they actually promised to read these brief descriptions, and they promised to actually print a brief article on the best one they received. Well, that's certainly incentive, isn't it? The thing I like about this issue is that they don't waste a lot of time on ads; they get straight to the first article on page 10. This is a series of tables to randomly generate the names of various businesses in town. This is a really good idea, becau...

This is the final Map-a-Week for November 2000; it's the Arena , another futuristic, Greyhawk 2000-style map. I don't really have anything to say about it, so I'll just leave it there.

So, this is the second of the 3rd edition Dungeon Magazine issues. This one definitely has a peculiar theme to it; nothing is quite what you would expect. I'm going to skip the letter column and editorial and get right to the adventures this time. The first adventure is called "Deep Freeze". This one is for 2nd-level characters, and is 'officially' set in the Theocracy of the Pale in Greyhawk, but it can easily be adapted to any campaign setting, such as the Forgotten Realms, Mystara, or Ravenloft. No, none of those have been adapted to 3rd edition at this point in time, but it's still possible. So, this is yet another 'find a missing person' adventure hook, and this one takes place in winter. There is an insane asylum up in the mountains where the missing people are supposed to have gone. When the party gets there, of course the guy in charge has no idea where they are. This is about as paint-by-numbers as you can get. The smarter play would have been...

Alright, we continue where we left off, in the Polyandrium, where the PCs are going to be entering into two unlooted crypts. The first is the Crypt of Rothilion, which is currently inhabited by a trapped creature thanks to all the wards and seals around the crypt. What sort of creature, you might ask? How about a mind flayer lich? Yeah, you're not fighting that thing. But all it's trying to do is escape, so once the lich realizes the party has broken the seals, it will attempt to get past the party and flee. Which sisgood, because I don't care how good you think you are, you're not going to defeat a CR 19 undead mind flayer with the powers of a 9th-level sorcerer. It's just not happening. So, let it run away and be thankful. Looting this crypt will give the party an important item, Rothilion's staff of justice , as well as the key to the next crypt, the Crypt of Orbakh. Orbakh's crypt has its own extra-special visitor, this one being a deepspawn that was bro...