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By now, you've probably seen the D&D game I ran for the writers and producers of Robot Chicken. It's all over Youtube (with and without DM commentary). The adventure, which I've since taken to calling "Tomb of the Orc Slayer," unfolds in a dwarven sepulcher nestled amid the greater dungeon complex of Undermountain, below the city of Waterdeep.

I'm giving serious thought to submitting this short adventure for publication in Dungeon magazine, along with adventures for the other two dwarven tombs mentioned in the videocast ("Tomb of the Heartless Dwarf" and "Tomb of the Iron Warlord"). Each tomb would serve as a standalone adventure, or they could be played as a series that concluded with the heroes acquiring three dwarven shields needed to unlock a secret dwarven vault within Undermountain

I posted a new map in the "Iomandra - Public" group photo gallery. The 11" x 17" map depicts Io'drothtor, a Dragovar city on the shores of Krethmidion (an island with a steel dragon overlord). This map, the third full-sized city map that I've created for my home 4E campaign, was drawn and colored using Adobe Photoship CS4. Feel free to plunder it for your home campaign(s).

For more information on my home campaign, check out the "Iomandra and the Dragon Sea" wiki.

Chris

I posted a new map in the Iomandra - Public photo gallery. The map depicts Io'drothtor, a Dragovar city on the shores of Krethmidion (an island with a steel dragon overlord). This is the third city map I've created for my home campaign (the first two being Io'galaroth and Io'calioth). The map was drawn and colored in Adobe Photoship CS4. I hope folks plunder it for their home campaigns. Enjoy!

Chris

I run a 4E campaign for two different groups of players on Monday and Wednesday nights, and both groups have just graduated from paragon tier to epic tier. In the Wednesday night game, naval combat has become a key feature of the campaign. I recently ran a battle between two fleets of ships: the heroes' fleet (each player was given a ship to command) and an enemy fleet. The battle played out smoothly, and everyone had a lot of fun.

Here are the rules I used to run the battle:

community.wizards.com/wiki/Dnd:Iomandra/...

This ship-to-ship combat system is not a simulation. There's no "facing," for example. It's also simpler than the character combat system because there are no opportunity attacks. That said, I will probably add a bit more complexity to the system over time (rules for combat

Cool things are afoot at Wizards.

We've made some recent changes to the D&D R&D staff. We've split the D&D creative team into two groups: the D&D RPG Group (focused on the 4th Edition D&D RPG and spinoff RPGs such as D&D Gamma World) and the D&D New Business Group (focused on D&D games beyond the RPGs, including board games and other stuff we can't talk about yet). Both groups report up into Bill Slavicsek, the Director of D&D R&D and Book Publishing.

Several staffers who used to work on RPG content have moved over to the D&D New Business team, including James Wyatt, Chris Youngs, Bruce Cordell, and Peter Lee. They have very exciting jobs, which I'm sure they'll talk about in the weeks and months ahead.

As for me, I've decided to stay with the D&D RPG, where I can do the least damage. LOL

One of the tricks I learned as a Dungeon Master was to keep a list of pregenerated names handy . . . specifically for NPCs. In the course of a campaign, my player characters interact with scores of incidental NPCs, and it's always nice to be able to give that "third dragonborn from the left" a name when the players ask for one.

The list of pregenerated NPC names I use for the Iomandra campaign is posted HERE

Feel free to pillage the list. In addition to NPCs, the list includes ship names (since Iomandra has a strong mautical theme). Many of the ship names can double as tavern or inn names in a pinch.

My campaign is currently set at the high paragon tier, and I've pretty much exhausted this list. But the fact that the list carried me through 18 levels of play says something about its efficacy.

If you hang out on our forums, you've doubtless heard the announcement concerning our Star Wars miniatures and RPG lines. Not the best news for diehard fans of our Star Wars games. I have a few thoughts I'd like to share that will probably have no impact on the angry few who wax hyperbolic on our forums, but they're good thoughts regardless.

First, who am I, you ask? I'm the lead designer for the Saga Edition RPG and the creative manager for our RPG and miniatures lines. I also edited a little-known magazine called Star Wars Gamer, which some of you über-nerds might remember from a few years back. I've been associated with Star Wars professionally for more than one-quarter of my life. The only one who has me beat at Wizards is my boss, Bill Slavicsek, who's been pushing Star Wars on you

My Monday campaign took an interesting turn this week. The heroes were settling accounts with the Horned Alliance (a tiefling thieves' guild) when they pushed two villains into the gears of a gargantuan contraption called a time prison (an arcane device built by a dragonborn mage for the Dragovar Empire — think of it as a creative alternative to the empire's current prison system). The contraption began to malfunction, causing "stutters" in time that wreaked havoc with the initiative order. Despite valiant efforts to stabilize the machine (read: skill challenge), it exploded with chronomantic energy and hurtled heroes and villains alike three years into the future.

This isn't my first use of time travel in the campaign, but it's the first time a group has traveled to the future. On top

I spent Sunday afternoon putting the finishing touches on a new map for the Iomandra campaign, specifically the capital city of the Dragovar empire. I had a clear vision of Io'calioth at the very start of the campaign — a city built on the ridges of a sunken volcanic caldera — and held true to that vision, thanks to the magic of Photoshop. Ah, Photoshop . . . is there anything you can't do?

My Monday group arrived in Io'calioth somewhat unexpectedly, courtesy of a 1,000-foot-high water cyclone—check out the campaign episode wiki for details, if you're curious. My challenge to myself was to create a city that surpassed my previous city-building effort (the cave city of Io'galaroth) and had its own unique character. I also needed Io'calioth to incorporate everything I'd written about