TerraDave
5ever, or until 2024
Not a lot of "reveals", but pretty entertaining. From his blog.
So Ari Marmell posted some thoughts on 4E on the interwebs (thankfully, the tubes weren't clogged). Unsurprisingly, accusations of being a corporate shill started to fly just because Ari does some freelancing for WotC. It reminded me a lot of something that happened to me some years back...
So way back in the day I ran a Star Wars RPG website dedicated to the D6 game. Mostly, it was just fan stats and stuff. When WotC acquired the Star Wars license, I started reporting on the news surrounding the d20 game. Anti-WotC sentiment was running high, and the internet was aflame with people decrying the system. Despite the fact that I'd built up a little bit of street cred at the time, sadly the moment I chose to keep an open mind to the d20 Star Wars game was the day I because a traitor, a corporate stooge, and a gaming *** in the eyes of a lot of people from the forums I frequented.
I've come to accept the fact that I'm a "liker." Maybe it's just my personality, but I'm more inclined to like things than not. I can enjoy things that most people find flawed, and it takes a lot of flaws to completely ruin an experience for me. I can like bad movies, I can play bad games (Talisman, I'm looking at you!), and I generally have a positive attitude when trying new things. But the moment that I started liking something from Wizards, suddenly my opinions ceased to be my own. I became a corporate robot, who only likes what The Computer tells me to like. I guess it's sort of like the scorn heaped on Microsoft.
I just think it's a bummer that you can't like something made by a big corporation without being labeled a robot.
Actual discussion about Dungeons and Dragons follows.
So, my first D&D campaign I ever played in was an Al-Qadim campaign. To this day, I still love Al-Qadim. Lately I've been cooking up an Al-Qadim adventure to run in 4th Edition, mostly because I've been itching for some Al-Qadim action for, oh, well over an edition now. The fact that 3E skipped over Al-Qadim entirely maybe has something to do with it. Anyways, I got to thinking about what Zakhara would have been like with some 3E flavor added in. I've been skimming over Sandstorm and looking to see how it could be used.
In a lot of ways, Al-Qadim was an extremely forward-thinking setting, and one that embraced a lot of the same design philosophies that 4E does. One of the things that stood out to me while reading through my Al-Qadim books was that the cities are all full of demihumans, who are all treated relatively equally. One of the assumptions for 4E is that all of the core species mingle with one another, with few animosities based on race. There are a lot of moral ambiguities in Al-Qadim, and it's not always easy to tell friend from foe. Then there's Fate--a cruel mistress--who doesn't take a direct hand in affairs (no avatars or the like) but whose effect can almost certainly be seen. Maybe I'm looking at Al-Qadim with rose-colored glasses, but it sure has been easy writing this adventure.
Al-Qadim never really struck me as a "dungeon crawl" type setting, but the mythology of the setting has the desert sands littered with ruins of ancient empires and cities that were swallowed up by the sands. I know that the whole ancient Egypt thing has been done to death in D&D, but I'm thinking if I were to ever do Al-Qadim again as a setting I'd give some of those ancient empires a distinctly Egyptian feel. I wouldn't want that as the primary setting flavor, but I could see a lot of adventures turning out a lot like Raiders of the Lost Ark: above ground has a distinctly Arabic feel, but when you climb into the long-forgotten city under the sand dunes it's got giant Anubis statues and the skeletal/mummy remains of lost kings and queens.
I had some fun turning statting up a Sha'ir and his genie, giving them a lot of interactive powers so they could do some fun things in combat. I also think I'm going to use a dragon we've been developing for an upcoming product and using that as well. I've also been cooking up a wicked encounter with a holy slayer. My first character was a holy slayer, and the one thing that always stuck out to me was how my DM told me that one of the big challenges of playing the character would be that one day he'd be called upon by his guild to do a public assassination that I likely wouldn't survive. I just love the idea of a single human holy slayer jumping into the middle of an adventuring party and taking them on. I'm thinking of a solo encounter here, with a holy slayer that assassinates someone right in front of the heroes, they get sucked into the action and have to deal with a badass opponent who they barely manage to take down with their combined resources. With all the talk of how dragons are going to be solo monsters or whether or not a pit fiend should be solo encounters I think it's easy to overlook how freaking sweet a single Medium-size human solo encounter could be.
The other sweet part of Al-Qadim is that it's really easy to do some good intrigue-based adventures in the setting. Who is the holy slayer working for? Why was his target the target? What twist of Fate brought the heroes into his line of fire, and why would she want the heroes involved? The hard part is going to be communicating the essence of Al-Qadim to people who know nothing about it, but I hope to be able to do the whole "heroes from a foreign land who don't know anything about the place they're in" thing without it being too cliche.
