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The party - minus Raina - blundered from the villa to find a squad of half-giants commanded by a templar waiting for them.  Still smarting from their confrontation with the legionaries, the team took a beating but managed to outlive their opponents once again and escape into the night, following Karas' lead to escape the notice of the many other patrols after them.  Eventually, a young elf claiming to have been sent by Zaethus - whom the party TOTALLY remembered meeting - found them and took them to a slightly down-market villa that served as headquarters for the Veiled Alliance.

Zaethus, Baristophocles and Melanthius discussed matters over wine.  Mainly they discussed the crystal skull - still whispering in Pik's ear - but Melanthius wanted the druid to stay away from his...

Of the freed Veyne slaves/sacrifices, only the three elves and solitary dray elected to stay behind on the minotaurs' island.  The party left them with instructions to wean the villagers off the lotus blossom that they found so tasty, and left aboard Kotnalishmaelantok's silt skimmer.

On the way back, in the lovely, non-stormy weather, Unbreth noticed a small creature flittering about in the sky, watching the vessel.  Karas quickly identified the winged, reptilian beast as a psionocus, a psychic familiar created by powerful psionicists.  Unbreth popped out his hand crossbow and shot the thing down,and the voyage continued.

When four much larger versions of the same creature attacked a few hours later, things weren't so calm.  The party were glad that they had tethered ...

So, I was part of a great Dark Sun campaign over 10 years ago, which was 2E.  We had character trees, and made liberal use of  the combat and tactics and skills and powers books to do a little homebrew campaign.  Recently, i unearthed the folder with these old characters.  Our campaign was based around The Army of the Seven Angry Tembos, in Balic after the events of the Prism Pentad in the revised campaign.  We kept psionics from the first edition though.  I have tried to remake them for 4E, spiritually if not completely mechanically.......

Malvoleo of the Wastes, Male Half Elf Air Cleric/Fighter with the Oracle Kit.  I have re-imagined him as a Warlord first with the Elemental Priest theme, but that was not optimized enough to suit me, so I lost...

This is a recap of things that have happened. I haven’t had time to blog lately, but the campaign has continued.

To maintain and strengthen the ritual hiding the grove from the sorcerer kings, the Avangion Ulynin asks the party to journey to Kalidnay to retrieve an item, an obsidian orb. Using it, she hopes to continue to hide her grove and strengthen herself toward her final transformation. Dryder continues to avoid her, worrying that he will be unable to stop himself from attacking her if he sees her.

After a few days, the party departs for Kalidnay. The desert trek is dangerous, but they eventually arrive. With the full knowledge of Ulynin’s warning to them (Do not enter the city at night…those who enter at night never leave), they move in, quickly working their

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The fight with Venticles Veyne was quick and brutal.  Even as the sorcerer strode down from his position atop the pyramid to attack, the skeletal corpses around him rose in seeming unending number and what little flesh they'd had left between them flowed together into a rather hungry sounding blob.

Shallahai kept the skeletons' numbers under control by pelting them with magic stones, while Ungarth unleashed his specialised form of brutality on the flesh-lump.  

Venticles fought on using telekinetic powers and defiling magic to leech the life of his opponents, but couldn't manage to shake Raina's dogged pursuit as he tried to keep from her punishing hammer.  Eventually, when he thought himself safe to feast on Pik and his menagerie of summoned beasts, the mul utilised her psionic...

The Eberron campaign setting is almost ten years old.

It was released as the culmination of a search for a new campaign setting, and chosen from amongst 10 thousand submissions. The contest began in 2002 and ended in 2003, when 3.5e was released and we saw the first teasing hints of the world, although the actual campaign guide was not released until 2004.

Let's quickly put that into perspective. I'm a librarian at an Elementary school, which is K-6, or ages 5-11. So the majority of the kids in my school are younger than Eberron. They have never lived in a world without the Last War and Warforged and magitech. They have never breathed the air of a world where there was no such thing as dragonmarks or dragon shards. Eberron is becoming less and less "the new kid" and more and more

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With an interest in finding a silt skimmer captain brave enough to take them, Pik, Karas and Raina went to enquire at the harbourfront tavern, The Furled Sail.  Karas' clearly patrician manners set him at odds with a group of surly muls, with Pik's lightning-quick intervention sent them on their way, and attracted the attention of someone who would be willing to help.

The dwarf captain Kotnalishmaelantok and the crew of the Dusty Breeze - tiefling Furtive, gnoll Muttley and thri-kreen Kr'k't'a - would be willing to sail off to Asterius, so that the party could wait in ambush for the Veyne team.  They would leave at first light, and would not linger too long at the island for fear of the giants that patrolled it. They would return at midnight the next day, and if the party ...

The party defended themselves as best they could from the attacks of the four hooded figures, as well as fending off the accusations of being defilers.  Karas gave one particularly well-worded speech, but it wasn't until Pik was forced to bestow healing magic on an injured Ungarth that the attackers backed off and admitted that perhaps the team were trustworthy.

The four admitted to being members of the Veiled Alliance, and also only present in the psychic sense, as to turn up in person would be a terrible risk.  When the hoods were taken down, the party recognised Baristophocles; his comrades were the patrician Zaethus, young man Atticus and old be-bearded loon Melanthius.

The four admitted to knowledge of the crystal skull that Pik carried, and how it was an evil tool of defiler...

The hook behind 5e, what really makes the edition special, is its emphasis on customization. Instead of the game telling you how to play, it will let you play the way you want, emulating the edition you want. 5e will have “rule modules” that can be used to customize and redefine rules, options that can be dropped into a game or used to build a campaign.

What are the must-have modules? Which optional rules that simple have to be included as soon as possible? Here’s my list:

By Any Other Name

First, I need to get one quick thing off my chest. WotC needs to rename the optional rule packages. The term “modules” is a little confusing, having been already used to describe adventures. Using “module” is a little like using “level”. D&D has

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