Excerpt: Fallcrest

[AllisterH]

Now this?

This is one of the main reasons why I was interested in 4E. Does it really help new DMs (and I imagine the woman from the secret diary of a casual gamer is a good example).

re: RITUALS
If anyone is interested, I'm pretty sure rituals will be refined versions of the Incantation system from UA.

 

[pweent]

If anything, the NPC is missing a +1 damage bonus from his +1 dagger.

I think the explanation for that is found in the Customizing Monsters excerpt. As an 8th level NPC, he has a magic threshold of +1, and therefore subtracts 1 from the bonus granted by magic items.

It's interesting to see how alike a PC and an NPC can look, with tiny reminders still that different rules still apply to them.

 

[Colmarr]

The town has some 2500 feet of wall with 14 towers - No way they have enough men to man it in wartime... Half the town isn't protected by any wall at all (the one facing the river). One part of the wall isn't even intact.

The houses are spread out as if realestate is cheap to come by. I wonder if the people that draw maps like this have ever been in a town with a wall? The houses within the wall are crammed together. If they didn't need the space, they would make the area protected by the wall smaller. Building and maintaining a wall is very expensive.

This looks more like somebody has taken a modern american town and built a wall around it, than a medival town.

Who said the wall was built recently? It's entirely possible that the wall remains from the time when Fallcrest was a city and had many more occupants. At that time maybe there was a much higher population density as you suggest, but if the town is rebuilding, it's understandable that people would spread out if they could.

 

[hong]

The town has some 2500 feet of wall with 14 towers - No way they have enough men to man it in wartime... Half the town isn't protected by any wall at all (the one facing the river). One part of the wall isn't even intact.

Correct. Now read the history of the town.

 

[Campbell]

Huh. I had low expectations, but they were happily exceded.

Some of the population numbers have implications for those of us who care.

1. There are more people in town than in the surrounding farms. This means there is some sort of food generating magic at work even if it's off screen crop blessings.

2. 5% of the population is under arms at all times. That is an enourmous number for a farming town. They must have some real problems in that valley.

I really liked the map. It actually looks like a believable map of a town. It's in an appropriate place for a town to have grown up, and the ruins nicely show the previous size and collapse. The castle is realistic, although whoever failed to put a tower over the only access road need a flogging. The town actually looks a bit large for the population, but some of those houses could easily be old ruins.

Population figures in role playing products should never be trusted. They're almost always nonsensical.

 

[FireLance]

I think the explanation for that is found in the Customizing Monsters excerpt. As an 8th level NPC, he has a magic threshold of +1, and therefore subtracts 1 from the bonus granted by magic items.

Well, my interpretation of that article was that the magic threshold is subtracted because the relevant enhancement bonus was already built into the base statistics of the NPC or monster. In this specific case, it appears that the enhancement bonus was built into the attack modifier, but not the damage modifier if you go by PC rules, that is.

Since NPCs aren't necessarily built according to PC rules, it's no biggie.

 

[Lurker37]

Come to think of it, wouldn't crop blessings be as common as buying fertiliser in a standard D&D world?

If you can shell out for super phosphate, you can hire someone from the local temple to come bless the crops, especially if it's been proven time and again to have reliable, significant results.

Sooo... if the local crop blesser was to go missing on one of his trips... *adventure hook*! "Find Johan Fieldson before harvest, or we all starve come winter!"

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

On "classed" NPCs:
Apparently, the NPCs primarily lack the daily powers. I can see why they did that.

 

[reutbing0]

In upcoming months, you’ll find that adventures H1, H2, and H3 (Keep on the Shadowfell, Thunderspire Labyrinth, and Pyramid of Shadows) all have locations marked on the map of Nentir Vale. There’s no reason why the relatively generic settings and place names in those early adventures shouldn’t connect into a simple framework so that a Dungeon Master who wants to tie these places and events together can do so easily.

I love this. It will make the barrier to entry for DMs al lot lower. If loosely tying products together is a trend that will continue throughout the product line, it will create a bunch of modular subsettings that can be plugged into people's homebrews. It will also reenforce shared experiences which fosters community. That community (with a little help from D&D Insider) could probably flesh that mini-setting out even more. I don't want to get too meta, but I do think these little things matter a lot. Also, that excerpt is pretty sweet. Sounds like a good starting point for a campaign.

 

[Hawke]

Sooo... if the local crop blesser was to go missing on one of his trips... *adventure hook*! "Find Johan Fieldson before harvest, or we all starve come winter!"

Johan Fieldson is spending all his time over in Greenplains blessing crops that are converted into residuum thus raising food prices for everyone else! Go find Johan and convince him this hurts the poor people of Fallcrest with the higher prices and also harms the environment more than crafting magical items without residuum...

Convince Johan
Complexity: 3 (requires 8 successes before 4 failures).
Primary Skills: Arcana, Diplomacy, Insight, Nature