Well I Just had Tremendous Fun on The Greyhawk Channel!

Did the show on the Greyhawk Channel. Had a lot of fun even though my microphone had me sounding like a hillbilly Kermit the Frog. Still fun.

Watch Tales From the Green Dragon - With Charles Akins! from thegreyhawkchannel on www.twitch.tv

Right, so now that I've done that and had so much fun I want to do more. Hit me up kids!

Sober Thoughts about the Newest Adventure from Wizards of the Coast

Last night I spent a bit of time, sober, looking at what Wizards of the Coast is doing with the latest adventure path and I'm just so damned disappointed with what we're getting. Again we're getting a re-imagining of a classic adventure. Again we're seeing a classic Greyhawk adventure and villain being transferred into the Forgotten Realms. Again I'm fucking disappointed. 

I fully understand that the Forgotten Realms is the engine that pulls the Dungeons & Dragons train right now, but I'm also aware that the only reason that is the case is because they have spent the better part of the last twenty years pushing that setting to the fore while minimizing all their other settings. They could have just keep all these re-imagined adventures in Greyhawk and they would have sold just as well while reinvigorating the setting for a new generation of players - or they could have moved us into Eberron and done something really interesting with all that settings lore. Fuck, they could have come up with a wholly new setting and it would have been better. I'm just so done with being in the Forgotten Realms in all the published material. I want to see adventures set in Greyhawk, Dark Sun, Dragonlance, and Eberron. 

Fucking bring on Planescape. I'm ready to move on to new worlds and fertile ground.

by Dean Ellis

It's One O'Clock and I'm Fairly Certain the Rocket Won't Wait.

This evening I was reading a RPG book where the authors spent seven pages detailing how time passes in their game world. The days and months of the year were given these silly names. The phases of the moon were described, with each given a special name. Worst of all the hours were called out in a quasi-Latin style. It was clear that the intent was to create a sense of verisimilitude for the world that they were describing but instead it all came off a bit contrived and silly. This setting isn't unique in this foolishness. Just a quick pass through my game library and it seems like in practically every amateur and professional setting I've been presented with the latest 'unique' calendar and denotation of time. Over and over again it seems that the authors can't wait to tell me all about how special their world's understanding of time is. 

Why, it's not Monday here; it's First-Day. 

January? No, no. You're saying it wrong. It's Fireseek. 

What time is it? Why it's half past Qui'Tar Jut! 

Now maybe you're players are really into learning the minutia of your world and are all about calling the various months by these setting specific names and using the tongue-twisting variations for the hours - but I've yet to play in a group that was willing to expend the effort. Instead the days always revert back to Monday, Tuesday while the hours go back to One O'Clock, Two O'Clock, and so forth. 

For a while it bothered me that my players couldn't keep to the imaginary calendars I had brought to them and that they didn't care enough about the days of the week to use their 'proper' names. Then one day I had an epiphany: they don't have time to fool with this stuff because all they want to do is play the damned game. To my players calling Monday, First-Day was useless. It didn't improve their immersion into the game world because it produced a jarring, mental disconnect that pulled them out of it. They had to think to call it First-Day instead of just knowing that it was Monday. Calling January, Fireseek didn't tell them anything useful because they had to remember that Fireseek was a cold, snowy month. All I was accomplishing by forcing such contrivances on them was making my games worse. 

As I'm getting older I'm finding that the best policy as a Dungeon Master isn't to get cute and come up with special names for the things I'm doing - after all, my orc isn't any less an orc if I call him a Thute - but rather to build on the cultural and societal touchstones that my players can identify with and readily assimilate into their play. My games use regular names for the hours, days, and months of the year, but major events become the names of the years within the game. When they destroyed the city of Kimber by triggering a massive earthquake that swallowed it whole, the year became known within the game's world as "The Year Kimber was Swallowed." My non-player characters (NPCs) could mention it as a touchstone within a conversation and the players immediately knew when it took place in relation to where they existed in the game now. It gave the world a greater depth than telling them that the year was 447 CY. To them 447 CY might as well be 1779 BC. It was a meaningless number that they weren't all that interested in remembering, but those major events stuck with them and gave them a grounding in the world. 

O' Greyhawk, Where Art Thou?

The other day Christopher Perkins, Principle Story Designer for Dungeons and Dragons at Wizards of the Coast, put out a poll that went like this:

_______________, for the win.

— Christopher Perkins (@ChrisPerkinsDnD) February 22, 2016

Out of the 2,829 votes Greyhawk got 538. Every other setting presented as an option by Perkins beat us by an average of 200 votes. That's just embarrassing.

I mean I get it; I really do. Dark Sun had a pretty popular relaunch during Fourth Edition (those Dark Sun books are actually really cool and you should totally check it out). Dragonlance still sells a ridiculous amount of novels and was really well supported throughout Third with an official Campaign Setting book and a bunch of third party releases from Margaret Weis and the Sovereign Press group. And of course Eberron was fully supported throughout Third and Fourth editions with supplements, adventures, novels, art, and articles on the website and the magazines. 

By contrast Greyhawk hasn't had anything officially published by Wizards of the Coast since 2007's Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk. Largely we've been absent from the conversation and we've seen Cannonfire, arguably the largest community of Greyhawk enthusiasts, steadily growing silent over the last few years. We're at a point as a group where we either need to become active in proselytizing the setting to other D&D enthusiasts or we need to recognize that the setting is going to become a footnote in the game's history. People will read about in Wikipedia as the place where Gary Gygax ran his games, and that will be all they'll know about it, and that's a damned shame.

The thing about it all is that we know Greyhawk shouldn't be left to such an undignified fate. As a setting it was home to many of the greatest adventures in the early days of the hobby. They're so good that even today we're seeing them shape what many people view as the standard of what a good adventure in our hobby looks like; which is great, but they're being moved out of Greyhawk and into the Realms as Wizards of the Coast uses them for inspiration and transplants them. They're creating a new standard of what good looks in modules like Princes of the Apocalypse for a whole new generation of fans that may never even think to go out and pick up what inspired their favorites. 

Greyhawk is a setting that I've found had enough room in it for my version of it, and for +Mike Bridges' version for it, and +Joseph Bloch's version for it, and for every other version you run into without the sort of cannon pissing contests that crop up every time you so much as mention the Forgotten Realms. The reason for that is that Greyhawk is so flexible as a setting: we have space ships, wars with demons and gods, artifacts so powerful that their names have been in every edition since they first appeared back in First Edition, all the named spells in every Player's Handbook came from characters that exist only in Greyhawk. Two of the most successful times in this hobby's history came about when Greyhawk was active: First and Third edition. In First, Greyhawk helped establish what was possible in the game and the adventures set there are still talked about today.  In Third, we saw the return of Greyhawk as it was the edition's setting; it was flexible, and by and large, loosely defined for this edition. In doing so it offered a level of freedom for new players that let them carve out their own Greyhawks and brought people like me into the community with this hunger for the setting.

Greyhawk is the setting that gives us the opportunity to do our own thing when we start out. We don't have a library of fiction that has established a narrative for our world that our Players feel we must hold tight to our bosoms. Our setting isn't filled to the brim with godlike non-player characters (NPCs) who shuffle our players' characters about the world like chess pieces; and quite frankly, the NPCs die far too easily in our setting for them to even hope to attain that level of Machiavellian power.

So how do we turn this about and bring Greyhawk back to the forefront? How do we get Wizards of the Coast to recognize what we see in this setting?

The simplest answer is that we have to get vocal about the setting. We have to tell the ladies and gentlemen of Wizards' D&D team that we want Greyhawk to come back with this edition of the game. We have to talk to them on Twitter and email the Wizards corporate office. But more than that we have to go to the places where people are talking about Dungeons and Dragons and role-playing games and engage them about the setting. We need to open Greyhawk up on reddit, and we need to encourage people to join it on Facebook. We need to be champions for Greyhawk, because if we aren't then no one else will be. 

The Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide Releases Nov 3; So Who Has the Best Deal?

I think that it's fairly safe to say that the Sword Coast has been the dominant region for adventure in the Forgotten Realms since the new edition of Dungeons & Dragons launched. We've been racing up and down the Sword Coast since hippies were getting murdered in Baldur's Gate to bring back 'dead' gods and now we're still there thwarting a group of raging Demon Lords in the latest adventure, Rage of Demons. So considering that we've all been spending a considerable amount of time hiking our way from one end of the Sword Coast to the other in an effort to kick some serious bad guy ass I've got to ask: how much do you actually know about the Sword Coast?

Before this edition of D&D I didn't spend very much time exploring the Forgotten Realms. I had read a few articles in Dragon magazine over the years but nothing really struck me as all that exciting. Then I played Murder in Baldur's Gate and I've kind of been enjoying the hell out of the Realms since; but I couldn't say that my knowledge of the setting is any deeper than the information presented in the modules I've been running. Which is why I'm actually pretty excited about the upcoming release, the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide.

My excitement, though, doesn't get in the way of my worrying about the state of my wallet because I'll be damned if I pay full price for anything when there's a deal to be had. So before I place my pre-order for the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide I decided to go out and find who was offering the best deal. Here's the results; hopefully it'll help some of you out too (Oh, and you can click on the Current Price link of each to go directly to their pre-order page).

 

Amazon

List Price: $39.95

Current Price: $26.05

Savings: $13.90 (35%)

Barnes & Noble

List Price: $39.95

Current Price: $26.31

Savings: $13.64 (34%)

Books-A-Million

List Price: $39.95

Current Price: $39.95

Savings: NO SAVINGS

Walmart

List Price: $39.95

Current Price: NOT CURRENTLY LISTED

Savings: N/A

!ndigo

List Price: $50.95

Current Price: $45.34

Savings: $5.61  (11%)

Venom Comes In Many Forms

So I was working on developing my own version of the Forgotten Realms - one with more nuclear devastation and less divine non-player characters - when I discovered that I may not be the the right person to run my friends through a Realms campaign. You see several of my players love the Realms; as in they can recite dialogue from Realms novels and know more about the lore of the setting than they do about their own religions. 

I'm thinking that perhaps the nuclear radiation and cobalt bombs raining down on the planet from space isn't the best route for these people to enjoy the setting. Instead I think I'll just have Elminster hanging from a tree when they come to visit him in Waterdeep. Oooooh, or maybe I'll just have a Realms vs. Greyhawk war with Greyhawk firing first, second, third, fourth, and maybe fifth. 

Yeah, that might be fun. Who's with me?

Musings on the Second Realms

The Bat was holding court. Around his table set the largest collection of self-centered losers that had ever been produced on the plateau. They had gathered together for a night of Dungeons and Dragons, or so they claimed. In truth most of them gathered to worship at the Bat's feet and to tell tales of their sexual conquests - which should have been impossible since all but one of them was a virgin.  

Ah, but never let the truth get in the way of a good lie . . .

I was in the back room of Elton's Lifetime Loser Lounge prepping for the night's run and trying to ignore the massive egos that were proclaiming themselves from the large group private room. They were intentionally projecting their voices so that everyone else in the Lounge would know that their game was the best, the funniest, the most creative. Only problem was they played like they were acting out a script and no matter the situation the lines never changed.

I listened as the problem of the night was laid out and recited their actions along with them. "The dragon," began the Bat in his low rumble, "has been attacking Shadowdale for a week straight. Each night he crosses the city billowing fire down on the rooftops and each dawn the city tries to rebuild. This morning the call has gone out for heroes. Who among you answers?"

I'm going to find Elminster.

Yeah, me too. 

While they're looking for Elminster I'm going to see if there are any lonely ladies looking for a shoulder to cry on.

"Aren't you a paladin who has taken a vow of chastity," the Bat asked, already knowing the answer.

Not a very good one.

------------------------------------------------

I started hating the Forgotten Realms long before I actually began playing Dungeons and Dragons. Morticia and her brother, Frog, would go on for hours about their adventures in the Realms. They met Elminster and that Blackcloak fellow. They went to the Underdark and then to Myth Dranor. They did this and they fucking did that and if you didn't already know the entire story then you were a loser.

Fuck that noise.

The boys playing in the Bat's game just reinforced my notions about the Forgotten Realms, and then I started reading the Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide (FRCG) for third era Dungeons and Dragons. Why in the world presented by the FRCG do they need me? There are hundreds of high level characters running about the realms! And the way that the FRCG came across encouraged people to look to the non-player characters and to let them be the stars of the show!

My god I play the game to be the star of my own story. My fellow players are doing the same and we want to be the motivational factor of the game. We want to tell our stories, not relive someone else's glories. 

But with my current group we could play there as they either don't care about the non-player characters in the Realms or they don't know about them. So I'm going to do a little bit of investigating and see if the setting is worth playing in, if it is my next campaign will be taking place in the Forgotten Realms using the Second Edition rules set.