Review: Arcane Power

Okay, I’m not the internet wizard I thought I was.  I just got back from a vacation (to Disney World!) and none of my posts auto-posted to the future.  So, I’ll be posting them over the next few days.  Sorry about that!

First off, I’ll be reviewing Wizard on the Coast’s Arcane Power, their second power source supplement.  If you’ve read Martial Power, then you know exactly what you’re getting into – builds and powers, paragon paths and epic destinies.  All good stuff in this one, though the power creep is starting to… creep.

My first beef is the presence of the bard in the book.  I mean, I get why and how and so forth, but when a book presents new options to a class that was introduced a mere month before, I kinda feel like I’m being taken for a ride.  That being said, I’ve always felt like playing Wizards’ games was a ticket to a very glossy ride anyway, so it wasn’t too much of a surprise.  Not only that, but the bard’s pictured in the book don’t seem to have any instruments.  I mean, unless a giant flaming sword and a bow and arrow are now musical instruments, in which case there’s a band I need to form.  And many of the bard’s powers have little to nothing to do with… barding.  Firemetal Shot, Wall of Anguish, and Arrow of Destiny all sound like kickass powers… for my ranger. And as for the other powers…  adding the word “cadence” or “euphonic” do not make it bardy, they just make you a tool.  But the Half-Elf Emissary seems pretty sweet – the Gambit power, partnered with 4E’s new minions mean that those bonuses are going to be huge.

The sorcerer gets some new gizmos, and I like ‘em.  Storm Magic is simple yet awesome, much like the thunder and lightning upon which the class build draws its theme.  I like it.  The Cosmic Magic build seems cool, but seems a little… catch-all for my tastes.  But some people who fancy themselves to be cosmic and deep will probably love it.  Moon Cage seems nice.

I can’t really speak to the swordmage, because I haven’t really gone through my copy of 4E Forgotten Realms yet, and haven’t run a Storm Mage, so… YMMV.

The warlock is where the shit hits the fan.  The Vestige Pact seems… begging to be broken.  Basically, your benefits are always changing, but seem to be about as powerful as the other pacts.  So, instead of 1 pact, you get dozens, depending on what you need.  (Well, you start with the choice of two, but you can get more with powers.  The whole Augment seems to be the veritable definition of creep.)

The new builds for the wizard are great.  After a decade of hating the Illusionist (it was meant as an example people, not the only school specialist), I have to admit I’m glad to see them come back.  And a Summoner?  Hell yeah.  Getting “Summon Fire Warrior” as an ability at 1st level just screams at me to be picked.

The arcane options are pretty… creepily fantastic as well.  I’m particularly fond of “Phantom Echoes,” which allows an Illusionist (or any wizard) to maintain combat advantage against an opponent for… well, pretty much ever.  Familiars are back, and in a big way.  I’m worried 4E familiars are going to creep up, but so far, with only four feats (one required to get the familiar), we’re probably safe for a while.  I feel like Wizards is listening to the complaints about the lack of fluff – little bits like the “Familiar Quirks” table seem to be a response to this.

The Epic Destinies seem to be getting a little more specific, with the awesome “Archspell” going all the way to letting you focus on one spell.  (Though, getting to use a Daily Power as an Encounter Power is pretty nice.)

Overall, Arcane Power is exactly what you expect – if you’re playing an Arcane-based class, you’re going to need to pick this up to keep up, but nothing too radical.

Coming Back After A Long Time

So, you’ve done it.  You finally killed Tea-A-MATT and Waht-R-DEEP, who were both totally out to kill you, and you were ALMOST about to escape the Alpha Complex when you got taken down by The Computer.  Congratulations.

But now, after a nice foray into another genre, a different taste of a different campaign, possibly even a different system or a different GM, it’s time to return to the campaign that you’ve been working on for the last two years.  You’ve finally decided on a Paragon Path (or Prestige Class, if you have trouble moving on) for your half-elf ranger, and you’re itching to get your hands on the new PHB2 for a look at some feats.  That wizard that seemed so bland a month ago is starting to look pretty sweet again – as they say, absence makes the heart grow fonder.  As a GM, you were wondering how you were going to make another adventure in another dungeon seem exciting to the players, but you picked up a copy of Open Grave, and now you’ve got some ideas on how to take the campaign in a rather dastardly direction – a dead ally is is now an undead foe.

When you and your group take some time off from your campaign to try and get a little variety, the transition back to the old and familiar campaign can be a little tough.  However, with a little thought and preparation*, you and your peers can return to your endless crusade against evil with a second wind and a dash of excitement.

• Free Level – Few campaigns will make it from 1st level to 30th (or to whatever top-of-the-tier-ranking-system suits your fancy), so, rather than be a miser, just throw out a free level.  Let the players start off with a new spell or feat or ability.  This will make the character fresh and new.  If you can, have the players pick their advancement before you meet, so you can tailor the adventure to their new feats.  (“I’m so glad I picked up Great Cleave as a feat – we’ve fought so many goblins tonight!”)
• Time Passed in the Campaign, Too – Not only has it been a month in the real world, but maybe it’s been a month in the campaign.  Or a year.  Or two.  Maybe you reached a good stopping place (this would require some forethought by the GM), and your characters had traded their swords for plowshares, and were masters of their estate, looking forward to a life of vinification and child-rearing.  Then BAM!, Lord Pharaxus not only rises from the dead, but sends his minions to kill your spouse.  Nothing to do but round up your old allies and go show a lich what’s what.  Maybe your characters spent some time in court, getting into the intrigue and what-not.  You gained a level (or two), and some contacts, when your liege asks you to step in and get a little more directly involved.  Like, fireballs and holy smiting involved.  Same characters, same fond memories, but a new direction, a new focus, and a little new flavor.
• Rebuild – This one won’t work for all campaigns, but perhaps your players have become masters of a system, and when you started they were but novices.  This is especially true when you upgrade a new edition.  Take an evening and let your players rebuild their characters.  This requires a little maturity on their part, and you should ask them to stay as close to their original character as they can, but let them make some corrections.  Maybe the GM doesn’t weigh social interaction skills as much as genuine roleplaying, and your players spent a million skill points on Conversation and Bluff and Streetwise, skills that are relatively useless under your game style.  Or they thought Staggering Smite would be awesome, and yet they’ve only used it once in the last eight levels and wish they had taken Righteous Smite instead.  Let your players rebuild a character.  There might be a little retconning involved (“Remember that time you cast Bigby’s Icy Grasp?  Too bad you can’t do that now.”  “I know… Uh… If only I still had that scroll…”), but any good group can get past that.
• Trade Players – This can be done any time (and I’ll probably make a full post about this as a tool in a group), but trade players.  Have the fighter play the mage and the cleric play the rogue.  Not forever, just for the first night.  This will allow the group to remain the same, but the players will get to try something new to transition back into the game.  Have your players be as true to their interpretations of the character as possible.  Your players will get to see new uses for old abilities (“I never though to hamstring and set him on fire at the same time… that’s awesome!“), and will get an idea of how the other players view their characters (“Boruthos isn’t anywhere near that arrogant… is she?”)  The second session back, the players will pick up their old character sheets with both excitement about their combat skills, and a deeper understand of how their characters are perceived in the group.

And there you have it – four easy (relatively) ways to make jumping back into an old campaign fun and refreshing.  Now, about what happened to Tea-A-MATT…

*Note: Why is it that every GM tip is easy and fun “with a little thought and preparation”?

And I’m Back!

One year, one day since my last post, and I’m back.  Let’s see if I can keep this going this time.

On Continuity and Barney Stinson

So, I watched a TiVO’d episode of How I Met Your Mother yesterday. It’s one of my favorite television shows, and I think it’s one of the best sitcoms on television right now, if not the best. But that’s neither here nor there.

What’s here is that there was a continuity error on the episode “The Bracket“. While that doesn’t seem like much of a deal, it is for a show that makes inordinate use of flash-backs and flash forwards and different retellings of events. (In fact, for those not in the know, the entire show is one giant flashback.)

See, in The Bracket, Barney Stinson mentions that he may have sold a woman for a Mercedes, which he then drove off. He also flashes back to where he stole a date’s truck while camping, and then drives off in it. There’s only one problem with these two scenarios…

Barney can’t drive.

Alas, in the episode “Moving Day,” it is established that Barney is terrified of driving and can’t really do it. (It’s all he can do to get a moving truck around the corner behind a bar.)

Bit of a continuity error. Ah well.

I’m not really going to review the episode, but I do want to talk a bit about continuity in your campaign. I like to think that the succession of all campaigns (when one campaign in a group ends, and another begins with the same players), falls into a few broad and vague categories, summarized by, appropriately enough, television shows.

1. The Office / Battlestar Galactica – The two campaigns have nothing in common except the basement where they take place. Setting, genre, feel… All are completely different.
2. House / Grey’s Anatomy – Same feel, same genre, different settings. Crossovers aren’t really possible.
3. Cheers / Frasier – Same setting, but cameos and crossovers are rare.
4. Star Trek – It’s the same show. Different characters, but you know what you’re doing and references abound.

Now, in the first two, continuity doesn’t exist and is a non-issue. (In today’s post, I’m dealing with really long term continuity. I’ll address shorter term, between adventure continuity in another post another time.)

In the third one, continuity is present, but is relatively easy. One is in Boston, the other is in Seattle. The only time you really have to think about continuity is when you have an NPC cameo, when there’s a little crossover. It won’t happen often, but it can happen. Otherwise, continuity can safely be ignored, or easily dealt with by any DM worth his salt. Occasionally, you might make a small error, but it can either be explained away as the slip of the tongue. (“Did I say the Eye of Thorgonia? I meant the Hand of Thorgonia. Sorry about that.”)  Others can simply be retconned in. (“I know Lord Salazzar would have been three years old at the Second Battle of Chanapoly, but he was propelled backward through time by a rogue Time Elemental.”)

Of course, these kind of gaffes should be avoided.

The longer a campaign runs, though, these gaffes become harder and harder to avoid.  My Countless World setting has been home to between seventeen and thirty campaigns, depending on how you slice it.  Errors are going to show up.

I’ve got three tips for avoiding these kind of errors.  Each of them work well in the context of role playing, though they might be more difficult to maintain in a more constrained narrative (such as a book or movie).

• Long Dates – The best way, in my opinion, to handle temporal continuity, is to make everything take forever.  No two hour battles – battles take a minimum of two days, if not weeks or possibly even months.  No month long wars – wars take years and years and years and generations.  This solves the problem that any time you reference two things happening concurrently, it could be the end of one and the beginning of another, giving you a wide window to work with before you commit an NPC to having been in two places at once.
• Short Dates – On the flip side of the coin, short dates can help, too.  If you refer to an NPC being at the Battle of Tunigia, “from the moment the ships came down from the sky” to the moment “we stormed the walls and raised our flags in victory,” and you’ve stated the battle took eleven weeks, you’re kind of committing your NPC to being their for all eleven weeks, which can preclude him from being involved in other battles of the war.  It would take some awkward backtracking for you to say they were there on the first day, and there on the last, and absent in the middle.
• No Dates – The final, and easiest, way to address temporal continuity is to simply ignore dates.  Don’t reference when things happened.  Sometimes you have to, either vaguely or specifically, but whenever possible, ignore dates.  (“He fought in the Chriminian War with your father in the year before you were born” should be cut to “He fought in the Chriminian War.”)  Often, this is not possible – Players need to know when things happened, and you never want to cut out the flavor if you can avoid it.

Admittedly, this is somewhat contradictory advice.  That being said, each piece of advice is appropriate at different times.

I also recognize that this advice is all about temporal continuity, which really has nothing to do with the aforementioned Barney Stinson continuity error.  However, it’s the first piece of continuity I want to address, and I started thinking about if after watching “The Bracket.”  Bear with me – I’ll come back to both short term continuity and non-temporal continuity another time.

Until then, there you go.

Nomenclature, Part Deux

Time for my second post on Nomenclature!  I’ve realized there are a few words and designations that might need a little explaining here at the Consummate DM.

First is the phrase “mini-campaign.”  I use this word to refer to a story arc within a greater campaign.  I realize that this might be synonymous with others’ use of the word campaign (without the mini), but for me, a campaign refers to however many sessions it takes to reach the end of the Player Characters’ stories.  While a given story might take ten sessions, the campaign could take years and years.  The ten sessions is a mini-campaign.

The second is a distinction in capitalization – Player versus player.  Obviously, every time I use the word at a beginning of a sentence, it will be capitalized and you’ll have to draw meaning from context.  However, in the middle of a sentence, my capitalization will matter.  But not much.  Player with a capital P means the players who are not the Dungeon Master.  They are the real world counterparts to Player Characters.  When I use the word player with a lower-case p, then I’m referring to anyone at the table – Players or Dungeon Masters.

On that note, another separation – that between Player and PC.  I think these two terms are consistently lumped together, and I want to make sure that my designations are clear.  A Player is a human body that exists in the real world and plays role playing games.  A Player Character is a character in the game world not controlled by the Dungeon Master.  I know this sounds rudimentary and patronizing, but I constantly see phrases like “If your PCs are unhappy…” or “If a PC gets an unlucky die roll…”  Player Characters don’t roll dice – Players do.

And last but not least, another example of capitalization – Drama versus drama.  Drama is bad, drama is good.  Drama with a capital D refers to the kind of stuff you find on teen girls’ LiveJournals.  Anger and bitterness, bickering, shallow, childlike behavior, and so forth.  When used with a lower case, drama refers to edge of your seat storytelling, the interesting clash between characters and forces in the gameworld.  You know, awesomeness.

And there you go.

The DM’s Role, Part 2 – Is Not

And now for the second part of my three part series on the Role of the Dungeon Master. This post will be on things that the Dungeon Master is not. These are things that are separate from the role of Dungeon Master, and while they are sometimes overlapped, are not in anyway integral to the responsibilities of the DM.

I have two roles, and they come down to the beginning, and the end.

• Inspirer – At the beginning end of the spectrum, the Dungeon Master is not the Inspirer. It is not the DM’s job to make sure the player’s are inspired. The DM, in his role as the Creator, is responsible for making sure the campaign setting is inspiring. But the DM needs to be inspired by his Players as much as they need to be inspired by the DM.Granted, the DM is frequently the Most Experienced Player, and it is the responsibility of the Most Responsible Player to make sure other Player’s feel creative, to help them get their sea legs. But if the Player is having trouble thinking of a cool concept, or creating a wild character, or finding a niche they want to fill, it is as much their responsibility, and the responsibility of the other Players, as it is the DM’s, to make sure that those concepts and ideas are brought to fruition.

• Decider – At the other end of the spectrum, in the end, it is not the Dungeon Master’s job to be the Decider. Some may argue this point, but I’m a firm believer that this is a holdover from the Most Experienced Player overlap. The DM should not necessarily have the final call.If there is a conflict in regards to the rules, I strongly feel that unless the DM knows oodles more about the system than the Players do, the DM shouldn’t rule by fiat. The Players should reach a consensus. Sure, if one Player is abusing the system, it’s the DM’s role to squelch that abuse, but otherwise, the DM should engage the Players about how they feel the system should be run. The DM shouldn’t just decide what they think is best without the input of the Players. The DM may be somewhat “in charge,” but they run the table at the pleasure of the other Players.

Now, some players may not agree with me, but I think these two are pretty clear. There are other roles that I will be presenting in my third part that I think are more subjective, but I think these two roles are clearly not intrinsically linked to the DM’s role.

Countless Worlds – The Shadow Traders

Okay, and now for my inaugural Countless Worlds post. This is big for me. I’ve been working on this campaign for years. It’s the only campaign setting I run. Every campaign I run is run in this universe, regardless of genre. This was the entire reason I created this campaign setting – so that I would have one volume, one world to keep track of. It was tough at first, but it has paid off. Now, I’ve got hundreds of organizations, hundreds of ships, pushing a hundred spells, and more NPCs than you can shake a fist at.

However, the purpose of this blog is not to go on and on about my awesome campaign. Alas. No, this blog is about good DMing. Ostensibly. So, while I will be showing off my campaign from time to time, but each time it will be to make a point about being a good Dungeon Master.

Now, it occurred to me that my post last night about pulling the trigger might not have come across correctly. So, rather than explain a little more of what I meant in abstracts, I wanted to show one of the aspects of my campaign that allow me to pull the trigger so easily.

Allow me to introduce the Shadow Traders.

If a loved one dies an untimely death, the Shadow Traders will bring them back. For a price. And that price is rarely money. The Shadow Traders are a guild surrounded by rumors, by worship and hatred. The price that they exact is not always immediately apparent, and many people have traded away more than they bargained for. Others are fanatically grateful to them for bringing back family and friends from the worlds of death. The worst stories told about the Shadow Traders are the ones about the people who try to back out on their deals. Worst of all, the Shadow Traders take more than you agreed to give when you try to cheat their price.

All Shadow Traders belong to one of nine Arti, divisions within the Traders. Members of the main seven Arti where all gray, and carry a blackwood staff adorned with the symbol of their Arti. Initiates belong to the first of the Arti, the Unarti, and wear white. The Exarti, the shunned, wear black and have no staves.

The Shadow Traders travel and live in famous black astral ships known as the Panora. About the size of a heavy cruiser, the Panora are not meant for combat. They mount minimal armament and defenses, since firing at the Shadow Traders is a death sentence. These black ships, constructed to look like grim visages of cities. Other than small and large shuttles, the Shadow Traders only travel in the Panora. These ships are the face of the Shadow Traders, and bring apprehension with them wherever they go.

I built the Shadow Traders as an outlet for resurrection. I don’t like putting resurrection in the Player’s hands. I don’t care if it’s a seventh level spell or a ninth level spell or a twentieth level spell. I don’t care if the material components are a bajillion gold pieces and a small baby in blue socks. I feel putting resurrection in the hands of the Players spoils a lot of drama. But! I still think it should be there. Something I learned a long time ago, irrespective of role playing, but especially in role playing, is that everything has a price. When you kill someone off, or take something away, sometimes you’d be surprised how far players would go to get it back.

I hate hypocrisy, as well. It felt wrong to me that Players could stab the villain with silver, chop him up into little tiny pieces, burn the pieces, feed them to a demon, burn the demon, and scatter those ashes across nine dimensions in three different temporal possibilities, and whadaya know, he came back. And yet, they drag their best friend to the local clergy, and “I’m sorry, he’s too far gone to revive.”

Thus, resurrection in my campaigns is an option, but I like to keep it in my hands. It works like this.

If you’ve got a fresh corpse, a simple cause of death and a good supply of magical power, there are plenty of magical options if you’ve got this skills and the dinero. But, if it’s been more than a few hours, or the body’s been decimated or poisoned with something potent or diseased with something treacherous, well, you’ve got to bring in the experts. The experts are the Shadow Traders.

Each of the seven main Arti have a different group of people they cater to, and a different cost. Thus, depending on the mood I’m in when Players want to bring back a PC or NPC, I could charge gold or weird quests or simply the valiant sacrifice of the life of another. Plus, with the exception of gold (and sometimes even then!) you can phrase it vaguely enough, in an oracle/riddle fashion, and let the players assume one meaning and then make up another one as a plot hook down the road.

By building this option of resurrection in, I suddenly found myself with a huge organization with a myriad of uses. Obviously, they can bring back characters, but they can offer quests to hunt down people who’ve reneged on their bargains, or the PCs can be hired to help fulfill bargains to raise others, or perhaps a Panora shifts in from the Astral Plane above a small town unexpectedly, hanging in the sky for days with nary a movement, and it’s up to the PCs to figure out what’s going on before the entire village riots.

The ultimate point? Build options into your campaign. Assume that everything is possible. If you can lay the foundation for everything, for every possible option, you’ll find yourself in a much better position than if you have to create the solution ten months down the line when one of the players confronts you with an expected quandary. One of the things the HERO System has taught me is never deal in absolutes.

He That Believeth In Me

Battlestar Galactica is back!

I know I’m a week late, but that’s what DVR is for! I just want to say that I was floored by last Friday’s Battlestar Galactica episode, the premiere of the fourth season.

Okay, I’m going to be discussing an episode of television. It’s going to involve spoilers. Don’t get your panties in a bunch. Consider yourself duly warned.

Now, the beginning of the third season had my jaw being propped up by my hands. The end of season two, when Baltar puts his head on the table and then picks it back up one year later… I haven’t been that blown away by an episode of television since the end of season six of TNG, when it turns out the Borg are being lead by Lore. So, it was hard for season four of BSG to pick up at the same tempo.

And yet…

Starting the new episode off at the moment season three ended was fantastic. I know it’s a daunting challenge to do that. Most shows like to let a little time pass from the end of one season to the beginning of another, to account for haircuts and other signs of time passing. So when I see a show go from one moment to another over the course of a summer (like Barney Stinson’s summer spanning LEGENNNNDARY), I’m always impressed.

Tyrol and Anders have always been some of my favorite BSG characters, so it was pretty sweet to find out they were cylons. And the scene where Tyrol slaps Anders around and gets him in the cockpit… I was reveling in it.

Starbuck’s temporal displacement? Nyeh. It was fine. She seemed far wiser at the end of the third season, but I’ll get over it.

Baltar’s sex cult? Awesome! And I have to say, the creation of Baltar, of all people, as a Christ figure, nay, a Christ figure slash pimp, well, that was genius. Pure, unadulterated genius. (Unadulterated. Did you see what I did there?) When Charlie Connor attacks Baltar in the bathroom, I loved it. I loved that it was right after Baltar shaved (I love BSGs use of straight blades for so many reasons), with Baltar both shedding the Christ symbolism, aesthetically, and taking up a more active role as a Christ figure by pleading with God to take his life on behalf of the child’s.

The scene with Starbuck and Anders was deft, if not inspiring. Roslin’s inherent distrust for Starbuck seemed a little forced, but I blame that more on Mary McDonnell than on the writers. (Don’t mistake that for a dislike of either McDonnell or Roslin – I’m fond of both.)

I have one chief complaint against the episode, which also functions as a nice segue into how this relates to good Dungeon Mastering. My chief complaint is the episode ending with Starbuck pointing a gun at Roslin. Lame. I hate how shows do this. Unless Starbuck shoots Roslin (and as much as I enjoy the character of Roslin, Starbuck shooting her would be AWESOME!), it’s just unfulfilled hype. It creates an expectation that Starbuck might shoot Roslin, but we know she won’t. I mean, we have precedent with Boomer shooting Adama, but that’s different. Ending an episode with a cliffhanger like that? Uninspired. That kind of cliffhanger only works if there’s a belief that maybe, just maybe, she might pull the trigger. And without that expectation, it’s just seen as a ploy.

Overview – 39,698 out of 50,298 survivors.

So, the segue. How does this apply to role playing and Dungeon Mastering?

You’ve got to pull the trigger. Not always, but sometimes.

Your Players have to believe that you might. If they think that you might, even if only once in a dozen or five dozen times, you can pull off those cliffhangers. You can scare them. If you can’t threaten your Players, if the only thing that scares them is scarier and scarier and yet scarier monsters, you’re failing to really bring the drama to your table.

Most of my established Players know that I tend to kill someone off about once a year. Might not be in their campaign. Might be with another group. But it does happen. And it’s not always with a big, bad monster. I’ve given characters wasting diseases, poisoned them, had them stabbed in their sleep, the whole of it.

Now, I can hear a few DMs and Players saying that this isn’t fair to Players, that they have an investment in their characters and that you should consult them first.

Horse puckey.

I’ve had Players, who were playing a big, strapping warrior character make one or two off hand comments during a session that it would be fun to play a cerebral wizard or a sneaky thief, and then come up to me after the session and try to clarify that they didn’t mean it. Because that’s all the justification I need.

Sometimes I’ll consult with a player, ask if they want to try a new role. Rarely is it totally out of the blue. It’s usually tied to a Players desire to change, even if only indicated by a comment or two. And it’s rarely if ever unavoidable. Diseases and poisons can be cured and assassins can be thwarted. But it’s difficult. I take it seriously. Because, and here’s the clincher, I make sure the character’s downfall is caused by the character’s actions.

A wasting disease caught from an affair with the mayor’s husband. A poison slipped to them in a magic potion they stole from a cleric. An assassination bounty put in place due to their wanton disregard for an annoying merchant prince’s demands. I’m a big fan of hubris – rocks don’t fall out of the sky and kill characters unless the character said he couldn’t be killed by falling rocks.

Let me make this clear – I don’t do this often. I can count the number of times I’ve done non-combat killings of character (combat includes traps and other dungeon disasters) on two hands, for my entire Dungeon Mastering career. But I’ve done it, and my players know it. And when an NPC threatens their family or friends or them, they know that it’s not hollow Evil Overlord ranting – people die.

And I’m not just talking about death. I take away magic items, I destroy towns. I do bad things as a DM. Again, rarely. But it makes all the posturing and threatening I do the rest of the year that much more intimidating.

Do it. You’ll add drama to the table, drama you need.

No two see the same Maro.

I stopped playing Magic: The Gathering a long time ago. Most of my time playing the game was in middle school. I picked it up again for a few months my sophomore year of college, when a dorm-mate of mine had such a monstrous collection of cards it was hard not to get into it. (And, admittedly, when I was in middle school, I was always wowed by gold cards, no matter how useless they might be. And my sophomore year happened to line up nicely with the Invasion release.)

Anyway, it’s been years since I played. But I still head over to the website, once a week, every week.

Why?

Mark Motherfrackin’ Rosewater.

His column “Making Magic,” which comes out once a week every Monday, is a treasure trove of useful ideas. His column is useful even if you’re unfamiliar with Magic, because, unlike the other columns posted on the site, many of Mark’s columns are only tangentially related to the card game. Many of his posts are about game theory and game design in general. And these are things that are useful for any DM.

While Mark may be referring to restrictions breeding creativity in regards to the five colors of mana in Magic, the general idea allows me to examine my own campaign, looking for ways to turn what had previously been restrictions into opportunities for exploration.

His reference to game space may actually refer to the library, the hand, the graveyard, but from it I infer a greater relevance to my campaign setting, looking for areas of the setting or the system or the Players own quirks that I haven’t diligently explored and ruthlessly exploited.

Virtually every article Rosewater writes gives me some inspiration for my current campaign. Even when he’s really, really in the thick of the Magic, and not so much in the middle of the game design theory, I can usually glean one or two tidbits for use. Sometimes, I get nothing more than the artwork for a card he references inspiring one or two truly epic encounters down the road. However, other times, I use an article of his as an outline for an entire series of adventures, a campaign within a campaign, if you will.

I haven’t figured out how to add these articles to my RSS feed. I don’t think I can – I think they want you to go over and read it and maybe click on some links to other things they sell. That’s okay. Do it. Go over there and read Making Magic – it’ll be one of the best free investments in your Dungeon Mastering creativity you’ll make this month.

Overall – 5 out of 5 mana! A must cast!

Bright of the Sky

So I just finished Kay Kenyon’s novel Bright of the Sky. And it was fantastic.

The novel is the first in her Rose and the Entire series. The Rose and the Entire are also the setting. The ‘Rose’ is our universe, and the ‘Entire’ is a parallel universe of truly epic proportions.

Kenyon does a fantastic job of blending science fiction and fantasy. The Entire is a world with a wholly different set of physics than our universe. At the same time, it’s a scientifically sound universe in and of itself.

The beginning of the book, which involves a distant future and a bit of science fact, is laid out in such a way that I, an English major with minimal scientific knowledge, was able to get what she was saying, the nitty gritty details of the scientific plausibility of the world she was revealing. It was deft, and it was appreciated.

The Entire is a world unlike anything I have ever read. Though it is science fiction, the sheer scope of its alien characteristics made it feel like it was a fantasy world. Weird creatures, unique customs, and a system of mysticism that borders on the magic, all combine to make you wonder at it all.

Now, the protagonist Titus Quinn (who gets the award for most badass name of a protagonist of a book read by me in the last six months) is your standard fish out of water. He’s from the Rose (our world) and he goes to the Entire (their world). His internal commentary give us a point of reference. So far, pretty standard. But Kenyon takes it a step further – ten years before the book even started, he was there. (These aren’t spoilers.) He’s suppressed these memories, and as he explores the Entire, they come back to him. So rather than being your standard stranger, he’s actually quite famous over there, and has to deal with that. A very nice twist on an established trope.

Best of all is Kenyon’s writing style. In addition to making the science incredibly accessible, Kenyon’s words just flow past you. There are occasional sound bites of truly beautiful prose, but for the most part, the words are ignored and all you take away is there meaning. For me, with a novel about a concept world like the Entire, that’s the way I like it. Every paragraph flows seamlessly together into a constantly streaming narrative. It’s really craftsmanship of the highest order.

Overall: 5 out of 7 Roses.