Dragonlance D&D Game Blog

Do you know the enemy? Do you know your enemy? Well, gotta know the enemy -- Green Day - Know Your Enemy Images can be a powerful tool for DMs. Some of the earliest D&D modules (i.e. Tomb of Horrors ) included illustration books that helped DMs to further show what the PCs were seeing at certain key moments and locations in an adventure. Also, along those same lines, miniatures not only help show where everyone is during a given moment of combat, but the sculpts and paint jobs also help clarify who or what the PCs are fighting (otherwise you could just use chess pieces for positioning). Another area where images can be very useful is for key NPCs. In any adventure there are usually one or two antagonists for the PCs to face, from the town mayor, to "the evil necromancer" to the "goblin king". For some of these characters (the necromancer and the goblin king) miniatures might be useful, but for the town mayor, a miniature isn't probably very useful,...

With the upcoming release of the 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons rule set, the web has been all abuzz about what the new game will have, what it won't have, and why you need it at your table... Along those lines Verys Arkon (not sure if that's a screen name or not) has compiled all the bits scattered here and there around the Internet on the new edition into a "lite" 4th Edition PHB pdf. On the other hand Paizo Publishing (recent home to Dragon and Dungeon magazines), and current publisher of the Pathfinder modules has announced their plan to continue supporting 3.5, with modifications. Their "4th" edition (or is that 3.75 edition?) product, the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game , recently released the free alpha version of their rule set. So let the dueling games begin... and call me when it's over. In the mean time, I gotta go out and get a Blu-Ray player .