CURSE OF STRAHD Is Out Today (In Some Stores)

For those of you near a preferred store, today's the day - the Curse of Strahd is upon us! The rest will unfortunately have to wait another 11 days until March 15th. But to help with the wait, here's a look at the amusing disclaimer in the front of the book (courtesy of Derek Myers on Twitter).

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For those of you who have the book, it is now available for review in the reviews area.

 

[Libramarian]

OK, you asked for it.

Have you (or anyone else) ever played one of their adventures preloaded into Fantasy Grounds? I wonder how much easier it is to run them with that program.

 

[sstacks]

Picked it up Friday, good stuff

Full review here:
http://shaneplays.com/dd-curse-of-strahd-review/

 

[halfling rogue]

Picked it up Friday, good stuff

Full review here:
http://shaneplays.com/dd-curse-of-strahd-review/

Thanks for the review!

Happy to see levels/xp is dished out via milestones. That's how I run my table.

 

[pukunui]

Picked it up Friday, good stuff

Full review here:
http://shaneplays.com/dd-curse-of-strahd-review/

Thanks for the review! Would you be able to post what levels are appropriate for which areas? I'm curious, and I won't be getting my copy till close to the end of the month.

 

[Chimpy]

I believe the traditional adventure format is outdated, inefficient, and not terribly helpful for DMs who actually want to run the adventure. By "format" I mostly mean information design. An adventure module is an intricate tool for a difficult job (help the DM run this adventure for a group of players), and the way the information is physically arranged on the pages can greatly help or hinder this task.

So much this. One of my bugbears (pun possibly intended) is bad RPG page layout and the way information is presented. Most of us have busy lives and we need to able to extract key information easily and quickly. I think RPG writers tend to think they need to write more words for some reason to keep players happy. Usually this isn't the case. Diagrams, maps, key points, charts, sidebars and concise reminders are all really useful, but are underused.

The only time I can think that more words are beneficial are in gazetteers or campaign settings, where a lot of background detail and story is actually useful.

 

[pukunui]

I recall Chris Pramas stating in a Dragon Age RPG-related episode of TableTop that he tends to just lay out his own adventures as a series of bullet points and the like (and the copy of the adventure he runs in the episode that you can download from the TableTop website is more or less exactly that). So you'd think he might've done something similar with Out of the Abyss. But maybe WotC told the Green Ronin guys they had to write in full sentences because 5e is all about "natural language".