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Greetings!

As some of you long-time readers know, I'm a big Phillies fan-and yes, I'm delighted that I get a chance to watch them in another World Series. It might seem like it's not much of a hardship to be a Phillies fan these days, but if you tried to watch that team from the mid-80s on up to 2000 or so (with the sole exception of that excellent 1993 season) then believe me, you paid your dues. I feel well entitled to the last six years of solid teams and winning records. At the time of this writing it looks very much like the Yankees will be our opponents, seeing as they've got a 3-1 edge over the Angels. It should be a great matchup. I think the Yankees have an edge, especially since they've got two very sound left-handed starters to throw at the Phillies and a lockdown closer in Rivera. But I'll be rooting for the underdogs!

OK, on to D&D stuff... First piece of news: Dark Sun has left design/development, and is now in editing. I've been working furiously on various pieces of this project since May, so it's a great feeling to move on. In my last couple of weeks I was working on smoothing out the writing and presentation in a few spots, trying to marry together the tone and style of several different authors and looking for anything that needed adding at the last minute. For example, Rodney Thompson came to bug me a couple of weeks back about the dragonborn entry in the Races chapter. (They get an "Other Races" style entry sort of like the ones from the FRCG or the Eberron CG.) He pointed out that while we'd tied them in with the world story well enough by marrying the dray concept with the dragonborn concept, we hadn't really done anything different with the essential character of the race. (In Dark Sun, elves are nomadic raiders, gypsies, and thieves; halflings are fierce warriors and cannibals; and so on.) In our design draft the dragonborn/dray were a race of mercenary warriors... not really all that far off their core D&D identity. If we were going to include a Dark Sun take on dragonborn at all-and we felt pretty strongly that we ought to, since there are plenty of players out there who are new to the game with 4th Edition and regard dragonborn as part of the game's core identity, just as much as elves or dwarves-then we ought to say something new about them and challenge the established conceptions of the race.

Anyway, Rodney's point challenged me to think hard about the dragonborn and what sort of Dark Sun "spin" we'd put on the race that would make them distinctly Athasian. My first response was "They're a race of bloodthirsty killers!" because really, that should be your first response to anything in Dark Sun. But that was a little too easy, and I tried to really think it through. It occurred to me that the noble-warrior theme for the race talked a lot to their natural Strength boost... so what would talk to their Charisma boost? Maybe the Dark Sun dragonborn are a race that emphasizes the force of will, ambition, and drive wrapped up in that Charisma boost instead of pure physical combat skill. So that suggested a much stronger emphasis on their natural talent for sorcery instead of swordplay. And maybe they are essentially dishonorable rather than honorable-not in a stab-you-in-the-back kind of way, because who would want to hang out with them, but more in a basely motivated way. Maybe the dragonish impulses of avarice and pride are very, very strong in Athasian dragonborn. Finally, the core story of dragonborn is that they're a race of loners who don't see each other all that often, so maybe in Athas they're more social than you might expect. Dragonborn clans look out for each other, and if you mess with one dragonborn in the clan, you mess with them all. They're big into vendettas and punishing people who offend or injure one of their own.

Take that all together, and you've got something interesting with these guys: The dragonborn (or dray) are a race of sorcerous merchants, hired spellcasters, pragmatic mercenaries, and maybe even slavers. They're not especially numerous, so you don't see a lot of them around. Their clans are like small, insular merchant houses, and they might serve as deal-brokers and moneylenders: disliked in many places, but regarded as very useful to have around. Heck, maybe some clans bribe the sorcerer-kings and templars for dispensation to practice magic or sell their services as assassins. That's a pretty different slant on the dragonborn, one that will let you play an Athasian dragonborn as a much different type of person than you might have thought to try with the core story. And that's part of the attraction of the Dark Sun setting: It shakes up the familiar roles and stories, and mixes them in a new way.

One more thought for today: SMALL WORLD. This is a new boardgame by Days of Wonder that I had the chance to play for the first time last week, and I have to say, I was really impressed. It's a great little game with tremendous replayability. It reminds me a lot of History of the World in its basic turn structure and scoring, but the brilliant combination of a random race with a random talent means that no two games are the same. It's a lot of fun, and I highly recommend it.

See ya next time!