DMG news from Rich Baker blog

[Wormwood]

And yes, 99.9% of D&D towns fall into that pattern. It's lazy GMing at best.

Towns are where you spend your blood-soaked coins and learn where the next evil temple is located.

And yeah, I wear my "lazy DM" pin with pride.

 

[JoeGKushner]

I know. It's as passe as killing monsters for XP, am I rite?

Or a vancian magic system. Oh wait...

 

[Vigilance]

I think they need to rename the location. The Town of Geneica seems apporpriate.

Maybe there can be some caverns nearby and a group of ogres that are causing some problems! Tribes of orcs that require armed escorts out of the town! Hell, it's another city for the POL campaign!

Maybe they'll go for the gusto and put a few fallen towers and military ruins around the town too!

It might be generic and even a bit trite, but new DMs need things that help them run simple adventures.

And the DMG should be the place where a new GM can get some help taking those first baby steps.

 

[outsider]

The "small village in need of a hero" is actually a really good way to start. Certainly superior to the "dark and mysterious stranger in the bar" at least.

It's reusable. It offers services that adventurers are going to need. It offers a good variety of npcs for the players to rp with. The players don't feel like they are being lead around by the nose by someone vastly more powerful than themselves. It provides people that will consider even low level adventurers heroes and who will cheer them on. Done well, after a few adventures in the same area the group will feel like they are actually accomplishing something aside from killing monsters and taking their stuff. This small setting can capture alot of the essence of D&D.

 

[Angel Tarragon]

In the last entry of Rich Baker Blog we discover a few snippet of info on the 4e DMG

1) the town will be called Fallcrest
2) there will be a short adventure into the DMG

Fantastic! Great idea! Way to go WotC!

 

[Incenjucar]

I'm all for a little back-to-basics.

Really, I like the idea of a new, generic, by-the-numbers, but high quality setting.

With things like templates (which I imagine will still be around in one form or another), and all the changes, the generic of yesteryear is no longer truly valid.

French Vanilla is out. This is the age of Vanilla Bean. It's still vanilla, but it's not the same Vanilla no matter how much the word Vanilla throws you off.

A new setting with level 30 warlock queens and fighters who can backflip over giants and stab them in the ear or whatever needs to be made, because darnnit, rewriting old settings and using those as core examples gets silly, -fast-.

 

[JoeGKushner]

It might be generic and even a bit trite, but new DMs need things that help them run simple adventures.

And the DMG should be the place where a new GM can get some help taking those first baby steps.

My hope is that this kicks the page count over the current 224 since it's going to be the same price as the PHB, which is currently listed at 320 pages.

 

[perchy]

I personally plan to run (maybe play) the DnD starter campain thats released a month before this, so this starter town shouldn't be needed for me. But i like the idea none the less

Adventure and town setting in the core books? Another nod to Basic and Expert D&D. Of course, Fallcrest isn't Threshold, but...

lol

think about it, all starter towns are described as the edge of something. the threashold, or the crest(edge) of a fall (dungeon time)
I like it.

 

[mearls]

Kudos, but...

Wasn't the town supposed to be famous or at least recognizable to veterans? Anyone want to tell me "Fallcrest" is in the pantheon of starting towns?

That said, I'm glad they went (again) with fresh-n-new rather than cram nostalgia in for nostalgia's sake.

We talked a lot about using an existing town, but a couple of things came up:

1. When we do classic stuff, we want to do it right. It'd be a bit of a bummer if you got the Keep, but none of the Borderlands, so to speak. With space an issue, we didn't want to deliver what felt like only half an experience.

2. It's a little easier to start with a fresh slate if you want to build a town that shows off the concepts and ideas in the DMG, especially when you have to fit it into the DMG. If we had to cut some stuff from Hommlett to fit it, that defeats the purpose of using Hommlett.

I have a good feeling about the starting area. I haven't seen Rich's work yet, but he was having a ton of fun quizzing everyone who worked on H1 - 3 on where we put stuff, what sort of geography we were working with, and so on. Working with him on H2 was great. It was humbling to watch him go to work on setting and world design in that module. World design will never be a strength of mine!

 

[bgaesop]

I like this, it sounds like it would be excellent for new players/DMs and as long as it has "here's how we built this adventure" bits in it I can get some use out of it too. And who knows, maybe I'll even use the adventure! *gasp*

It's supposed to be built on the ruins of a much larger city. Could be Greyhawk.

(That's a joke -- I hope.)

Hahaha oh gods that would be fantastic.