Gary Gygax, the co-creator of the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game, died earlier today. God only knows how many hours I’ve spent playing his game over the years. Many of the tropes he introduced through Castle Greyhawk and the now-iconic characters from his early campaigns are planted in the fertile imaginations of millions of people around the world, young and old. I raise my Bigby’s Interposing Hand in salute, old man.
Back when Wizards of the Coast canceled Dragon and Dungeon magazines as printed product lines, Paizo Publishing took it upon themselves to finish up an adventure series they already had in-progress. The result was the Rise of the Runelords, a six-part adventure set in a new campaign setting of Paizo’s creation. As with previous adventure paths (starting with the Shackled City that started in Dungeon #97 back in 2003), it is intended to take a group of lowly 1st-level adventurers through an interconnected series of challenges that weave together into a grand adventure culminating with some pretty impressive high-level stuff. Ending an adventure path at level 20 is a reasonable expectation, and the challenges at the climax are worthy adversaries.
I haven’t actually run Rise of the Runelords, having purchased each installment more as a symptom of my RPG addiction than for any practical purpose, but I’m sorely tempted to give it a shot now that I have all the material. Central to the premise is an ancient, largely-forgotten empire ruled by a fractious group of specialist wizards. Some great cataclysm came down upon this ancient empire, and the ruling wizards (the Runelords of the adventure’s title) had to withdraw from the world until they could reconstitute their power. A variety of events have finally come to awaken the transmuter Runelord, which represents a tremendous threat to the wellbeing and safety of everybody on the continent.
A theme that runs throughout the adventure path is the close association of the seven deadly sins with the seven schools of Thassalonian magic (they didn’t have Diviners, it turns out). They may Evocation to Wrath, Transmutation to Greed, Enchantment to Lust, Conjuration to Sloth, and so forth. The less-than-heroic tendencies and personalities of the heroes are to be used at various times, with certain encounters keyed to whoever the most proud party member is, or the greediest, and so forth. The seven deadly sins show up frequently as the primary motivations for the various villains and scoundrels that appear throughout the Rise of the Runelords, something that helps set this story apart from others I’ve seen.
The production quality is excellent, printed in full-color on solid-feeling glossy paper. A number of talented writers and artists were called to collaborate on this project, with writers like Wolfgang Baur and Nicolas Logue putting their weight into background information and individual legs of the adventure, and artists like Wayne Reynolds putting together some great illustrations to help give everything the pop that helps a DM whet his appetite. Priced at $USD19.99 apiece, picking up all six is a bit on an investment, the blow made softer in my case by being spread out over a whole year. I’ve run through the first few chapters in my head and am pretty confident it would take my play group the better part of two years to pound our way through this, which makes it a reasonable investment if you’re keen on the idea of running somebody else’s creation.
Next up will be the Curse of the Crimson Throne, which takes place in the same campaign setting (starting in a different area, one that the party wouldn’t likely have visited in Rise of the Runelords). The Curse of the Crimson Throne should have six installments (I’ve seen preview covers, but only the first three look finished to me, the tail end appearing to be mock-ups put together with artwork from the first adventure). This will be followed by another adventure named the Second Darkness. I’m guessing that the folks at Paizo are pretty happy with how things have been going since their magazine publishing days.
My weekly RPG group has recently reverted to a Forgotten Realms game, complete with the stereotypical traveling-circus nonsensical party composition (an Ogre, two Humans, a Gnome, and a Halfling), and I’ve taken it upon myself to give the fabled Tome of Battle, the Book of Weeaboo Fightan Magics a shot with a Silas Coldwater, Crusader of Tyr.
In broad terms, the Tome of Battle seeks to make melee combatants more interesting to use than simply Move Action, Attack with the occasional Full Attack, 5-foot-step. The kinds of tactical options available to the typical Fighter or Barbarian character have generally involved wading hip-deep into rules that involve attacks of opportunity, special modifiers, and contested die rolls (grapple, trip, bull rush, and sunder: I’m looking at you, here). Basically they bog things down and tend not to be terribly useful against Gargantuan critters with more than two legs. Tome of Battle introduces three new character classes — basically just Fighter variants — that take advantage of a new set of rules for Maneuvers and Stances.
Maneuvers operate a lot like spells in that they have minimum level requirements. In the case of my Crusader, I can make an extra-powerful “Mountain Hammer” attack every once in a while, or use Stone Bones to gain temporary damage reduction, or a number of other flashy tricks. Stances are special maneuvers that are pretty much always on. Silas generally operates in Iron Guard Glare stance, which grants an armor class bonus to all his allies (but not to himself) against any opponent that Silas threatens.
The Tome of Battle is considered one of the books that 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons will be drawing greatly from; it was an experiment in some new ways of handling tactical encounters that works pretty smoothly. It also shows a bit of how the Wizards of the Coast folks would like to handle character advancement going forward. They wanted to make it so that players would have interesting choices to make every time their characters become more accomplished. For a Fighter, character progression meant a small number of skill points, often used simply to reinforce aptitude in areas that character was already good at, the Fighter would get some more hit points, and his base attack bonus would go up. Yawn. Every second and every third level, the Fighter would get to select a new feat. This is the chief way in which a Fighter would differentiate himself, the primary mechanism by which he’d be cool.
For the Crusader, they mix this up a bit. To illustrate, I’ll describe the decisions I got to make on my way to 6th level.
That doesn’t go into the various interesting class abilities. Basically I get to make real decisions in mid-combat without having to muck through a massive spell list. Nice. The other Tome of Battle classes, the Sword Sage and Warblade, have their own distinct flavors, differentiated by the palette of maneuvers available to them, their class abilities, and the means by which they get to refresh their maneuvers.
A lot of the descriptive text is the kind of poorly-conceived high fantasy oriental tripe that I expect from Dungeons & Dragons, the kind of stuff that leaves me incapable of running a serious game in Greyhawk or the Forgotten Realms. That said, it’s an interesting addition to the way that D&D operates. Separate it a bit from the half-baked mysticism and I think they’re really on to something here. I can only hope that their approach to the 4th Edition Fighter is heavily inspired by the game mechanics, if not the fluff, of this book.