Recent content by Ibrandul

Vecna. It has been a very long time since WotC published an adventure of any length, original or "updated"/converted, that I thought was worth running. But I do still find their campaign-length adventures amusing to read through as novels-in-adventure-format.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE After a very brief search, Wizards of the Coast, subsidiary of Hasbro (NASDAQ: HAS) Gaming, announced today that it has selected David Williams to replace outgoing Cynthia Williams as company president. Reached for comment, David Williams said he plans to embrace modern...

WotC runs a survey that seems to have no purpose other than to answer the question, "Do our customers really hate us? How much?" and then shuts it down almost immediately—presumably after seeing early results coming in. A few weeks later, president's abrupt departure is announced. These two...

"What You Thought a Tire Tread Said"

That "satchel" is worth more than the pile of treasure it's lying on...

That may be concerning inasmuch as he is an excellent game designer, so firing him may indicate WotC doesn't value excellent game designers as much as it should. But he hasn't been working on D&D at all for years now—he was moved to a non-public-facing role on the Magic side of the company...

I’ve read Johnson’s earlier FR novels and figured this one would be more like her movie prequel, but thanks for the confirmation. I haven’t read the Eberron fiction and didn’t know they were generally less R-rated—my kid loves Eberron so we might try those next. I’m an old FR junkie, the kind...

How would you rate its kid-appropriateness? I'm a longtime FR novel reader but there are precious few of the old books that would be appropriate for a 10- or 12-year-old. The new batch seem different, even the ones not explicitly aimed at kids or "YA" readers. Does this one continue the trend...

I was thinking of buying the Lore & Legends collector’s edition partly to get this (gorgeous) map, but now that I see a detailed version, the misplaced locations really bug me. And they’re not just slightly misplaced. The Stone Bridge isn’t even on the river, the Temple of the Elemental Eye is...

I sometimes roll. Usually what I do instead is, when more than one of a single monster type appears in an encounter, I will “fake roll” by adjusting HP around the average. So zombie 1 will have an extra 5 HP while zombie 2 will be down 5, etc.

Storm King’s Thunder includes a whole encounter set in Triboar, including a keyed map of the town. Although the encounter does involve giants, it is easily repurposed for campaigns other than SKT. If LMoP/DoIP players should decide to head to Triboar for whatever reason, that’s what I would run...

While this is certainly true, it’s also true that editing and proofing are very difficult tasks, and mistakes are bound to slip past even the most careful of us every once in a while. That’s why you build in redundancy—the editor, the copy editor, and the proofreader ideally will be three...

Random House doesn’t just distribute D&D books—they also publish them. Novels, that is: the current Dragonlance trilogy as well as the movie tie-in novels were all published by Random House. That publishing deal is probably based on a totally different contract than the distribution deal. But...

Oh don’t worry—WotC is already itself distributing the card sets that GF9 designed.

I would guess that WotC includes a blanket "You can never publicly discuss anything about this deal for all eternity" clause in all their contracts. For example, their lincensing arrangement with Gale Force Nine ended at some point in the past year or so—quietly, with absolutely no comment from...