It is a shame that the dice are missing though; I lost them years ago (they were really rather rubbish polyhedrals though). For that matter, I think there was a crayon that came with them so you could colour in the numbers…

Being more serious for a moment, if I were to buy the D&D Essentials box, how often would I grab the wrong box from my shelves by accident?

(I didn’t say how much more serious I was going to be, but perhaps there is such as a thing as too much nostalgia.)

My encounters, over the years, with Dark Sun have been short and fleeting, but the setting has always managed to catch my interest by virtue of being sword and sorcery but unlike just about everything else that falls into the category.

With the release of the new edition of the setting, I thought that now would be as good a time as any to do something about that interest. One nice book with the core of what was needed. Not a fan produced PDF (no matter how good, a book is a more comfortable read), not something out of print and impossible to track down, but a single tome to set the ball in motion.

Wonderful. Setting sorted.

Then I went to look for the rules, and that is when everything started to fall apart.

Six months ago, I wouldn’t have had a problem. Reservations about 4e in general aside, I would have just picked up the cores (helped by the fact that I keep coming across cheap offers for the limited editions of them). Two things are stopping me.

Errata. I gather that there is a big ball of errata out there that has made some fairly major changes to the core.

It doesn’t help when I come across comments such as:

The one thing keeping players sane is the Character Builder. Because it’s constantly updated, we don’t have to worry too much about keeping up with all of the updates. Of course, it makes us look at our core rulebooks and wonder why we bother to carry them around.

Really? I do not play any single RPG often enough to justify a monthly subscription to the rules.

We also have:

WOTC never actually updated the original monsters with the updated math we find in the Monster Manual 3

So, not only is there a lot of errata, but it seems there should be a lot more.

So we reach the second thing which, while being a barrier to me buying the cores, might just provide an alternative. Essentials.

The problem with Essentials is that it just isn’t all that clear if it is going to be enough to run Dark Sun.

I’ve seen forum comments which suggest it is just about possible, but might need a PHB3 to assist.

I’ve noted the utter failure on the part of WotC to mention Essentials on their Upcoming Products page.

I’ve seen the front loading of the product name completely wreck the usefulness of search results on the WotC site (and am having difficulty believing I’m in danger of veering off into an SEO rant on this blog).

I short, I just can’t find any guidance from WotC on the question “Does Essentials have everything essential to make good use of the Dark Sun core?”, which isn’t a good sign for a product that is supposed to make it easier to get into D&D.

I think I might be sticking to my usual system based around a 20-sider. Would anyone like to try to convince me otherwise?

A few months ago I mentioned that I had started pulling together some figures for a game of Fantasy Craft (and excellent system that has just had its first batch of errata). As usual, other projects got in the way, but I have finally got a significant number fully painted — more then I originally planned, but I’ll come to that in a minute. Today I applied a coat of matt varnish and can call the first batch “finished”, so I’ve taken some pictures and will relate the story of how they came to be.

The original plan was to paint a few figures to represent House Deneith mercenaries in my ongoing, but infrequent, Eberron campaign. (I also plan to paint some Orcs, and should probably up the priority of that little project as we are getting close to the session when they come out to play with the merry band of heroes).

When I want to get miniatures, I usually make Foundry my first port of call. They are a little on the expensive side, but produce some very nice figures — and the frequency of their 20% off deals helps a lot! The trouble with getting nice figures is that it leads the fanatical Warhammer players that you call “friend” to make comments such as “They would make a great core to a really characterful Empire army!”. To which there is only one response — “Yes, yes they would.”

So it seemed I was doomed to getting back into Warhammer, and I stuck my head in the Empire army book and tried to figure out what I wanted from an army. The answer was simple, cannons and other things that go “Bang!”. The fluff suggested a Nuln army and, while the text shouted “Black! Black to hide the soot marks!”, the pictures showed a number of units which had gone for a red and black colour scheme.

I took another look at the House Deneith pictures in the Eberron source books. Black and red was a common theme. It seemed the world wasn’t going to give me an excuse to avoid it.

I dabbled with various figures and eventually got to the point where I was painting my first cannon (I have another two still waiting in their blister packs). How was I going to apply my colour scheme here? I looked up and saw, framed and hanging on my wall, the answer in a holiday photo I had taken a couple of years previously.

Too many coincidences?

Meanwhile, Warhammer 8 has been released and given me another reason to keep painting. At the current rate, I should shortly have enough fully painted models to be a reasonably sized army and will be able to take them to the tabletop with some degree of pride.

Happily I managed to escape having bought nothing more then the three things I went in to buy (two pots of paint and some plastic glue). The afternoon was spent working on some House Deneith figures for my Fantasy Craft game. I have a long way to go, but it should make for an entertaining next session.

It has been a very long time since I’ve been able to run it (so long that one of my players has forgotten about the interesting dice in the game), and I’m really looking forward to getting my GMs hat on tonight.

I’ve been lifting large chunks from a prewritten adventure, but the third act never really sat well with me. So I decided to rewrite it, less than 24 hours before I ran it. Aren’t I clever? Still, I think my efforts last night were worth it, I got rid of annoying sequence of repeated “Look here, fooled you! Look here instead!” scenes, and added an Indy reference (along with a few things that I’d better not talk about before they come out in play).

The classic system is 4dF. A dF is a FUDGE die and has six faces representing the numbers -1, 0 and 1 twice over. It is a d3-2.

Starblazer Adventures uses a different approach and rolls d6-d6. This has the advantage that you don’t need to run out and buy dice that are so specialised that your friendly neighourhood gaming store doesn’t sell them.

This morning I decided to invest a few minutes into doing some analysis and comparison of the two systems (no doubt duplicating other people’s work, but entertaining myself in the process).

I generated all possible results that each of the two systems could provide, and converted them into percentages and then charted them.

There isn’t much to choose between the results, although the FUDGE dice give slightly less variance and are more likely to hit closer to zero.

I have found my notes and all the character sheets from the last couple of times I have run the game — both one off sessions — and will be volunteering to run the game every Tuesday night for six weeks. Gulp.

I might even find time to write up the last session. I think I can remember most of what happened.

I haven’t been about to give it much of an outing yet — I had a weekend full of friends visiting, movie watching, Dragonmeet attendance, and GMing of Fantasy Craft — but I did manage to squeeze in a couple of games last night.

I started out attempting the tutorials, but they seemed geared up more to teach Blood Bowl then the control system the game uses, which I felt left to figure out for myself (possibly I just wasn’t looking in the right places).

Once you get the hang of it, the controls are pretty easy. Point to where you want the action to happen, click, and the system figures it out. So click on a square to run to it, a teammate to pass, an opponent to block or blitz and so on. Just don’t get scared off by the range finder when you have the ball, clicking an empty square will still move to it.

So, with the controls figured out, what next?

The AI seems pretty easy, but that could be a combination of using the default settings, having played the boardgame version before and possibly finding “my team”.

I’ve never given Chaos an outing before, but they have a nice balance of stomp and speed. We’ll have to see how they handle themselves if they come up against a Dwarf team (who are as stomping as you can get but about as fast as an injured snail).

The fluff is good too. It has nice graphics and amusing commentary.

Overall? I’m looking forward to getting into it a bit more, and then venturing out onto XBox Live to see how I handle myself against intelligence that isn’t artificial.

Q-workshop present dice set for the third part of series released by Paizo Publishing – Pathfinder Chronicles: Second Darkness. Dice in our new colour scheme – purple & silver – vividly reflect the devious nature of Dark Elves, their cunning, secrecy and

… but, for whatever reason, trail off.

I wonder how that sentence is supposed to end?

Having given it some thought, I suspect it should be: squinty eyes that are cursed to suffer reading spidery script in low light conditions. (I confess, I like to be able to read my dice).

Can you do better?

In the meantime, however, I present:

If two players get the same result — reroll.

List of named NPCs via Wikipedia.