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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aegeri" data-source="post: 5529678" data-attributes="member: 78116">Poorly, they released a monster builder incapable of building monsters and moved the Character Builder to an Online version. The Online CB either works very well or poorly - depending on who you ask (for me it doesn't work at all) and only has a limit of 20 characters. Dragon is posting less and less actual content every month and the compiled issues are no longer there (so if you want to catch up, you'll need to download every individual article yourself). Dungeon is steadying the ship though, largely thanks to Robert J. Schwalb.The VTT is due for wider release soon though as far as I know. I don't know anything about this because the two online games I do run are using maptools and I am perfectly satisfied with maptools. I don't have a lot of interest in the VTT as a result.A short series of stuff called "Essentials" replaced the main line of PHB/DMG/MM as the basic set of DnD to get started with. Many of these design decisions are quite contrary to what happened in 4E before: Like martial classes having no real choices of encounter power (just 1 they get multiple times) and dailies were stripped off them.They are publishing a lot of wizard builds. A lot of them. So if you REALLY like wizards then you sure are in luck at the moment! The latest book, Heroes of Shadow adds in a monster class called the Vampire. It is really whacky design wise and is the most on rails class in 4E - even the martial classes can't match it for linearity. They have also gone back to adding racial penalties into the game - arguably unnecessarily at that. Two races from Heroes of Shadow shade have such penalties. The Shade has a -1 penalty to surges and the Vryloka gets -2 to their surge value when bloodied.Books like Primal Power and such no longer exist. Instead PC books are going to be framed around elements where they come from, like Heroes of Shadow and the next book is Heroes of the Feywild. Monster Books are now boxed sets that come with an adventure themed around the boxed set and tokens (this I really love btw). Other "sourcebooks" look to be going the same way, like the Shadowfell boxed set. It also has a deck of cards for representing the shadowfell getting to you. Speaking of cards, they also released a deck of collectable "buffing" cards called Fortune Cards into the game.Movie and game tie-in products seem to be the case in future, with them publishing in future a Book of Vile Darkness (to tie into the cheap made for TV movie on the Science Fiction channel) and the Neverwinter Campaign Guide (to tie into the equally cheap Xbox live arcade DnD action game). Gamma World was released, which is a science fiction variant of 4E that uses some pretty whacky character creation rules. It's fantastic fun and I recommend it if you buy anything from the post-essentials era. I just love this to pieces and sincerely hope there is more to come (but it is looking doubtful <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" />).And Dark Sun was released and it was the last truly great thing that Wizards released. I cannot recommend you get anything else more than Dark Sun if you do not have it. Also pick up the Creature Catalog as well (I do wish that was a boxed set with tokens and an adventure ala Monster Vault. I would buy that so hard). The adventure isn't great though and you can ignore that, but you'd be doing yourself a disservice by not getting Dark Sun I can assure you.All your previous stuff is still compatible with the new stuff (and don't believe anyone who tells you otherwise). You will not probably get many new options for older stuff anymore I would guess, but they are re-releasing most of the old PHB1 classes online (and for free it appears). So you can get updates easily this way for stuff that has been changed. This also reintroduces many "AEDU" classes like the original fighter into essentials proper.So that's about it that I can think of off the top of my head.</blockquote>

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