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Why don’t you start off by telling me a little bit about you and your history with D&D, what you're playing now, and anything else you want people to know about you?

My name is Chris. I live in northwest Florida with my beautiful wife and two sons. I am a small business owner, woodworker, amateur author, artist, and total RPG enthusiast.

My history with D&D goes back to 1st edition AD&D in 1986. I was 10 years old and, after having looked through a friend's Player's Handbook, was instantly hooked. I was an avid player until 1989, when 2nd edition was released, at which point I took my first stab at DMing. Since that time I have primarily DMd the various editions of D&D.

Right now I DM a weekly 2nd edition game at home, a weekly 4th edition game at my FLGS, and a weekly playtest...

In today's Legends and Lore article, Mike talked about the iconic cleric ability of turning undead. I loved the idea of individual undead monsters having differnet turn undead entries in their stat blocks because it felt like a cool way to distinguish the different undead - give them mechanics that reflect their flavor. You can actually see something akin to this in action in 4E - several undead monsters have a "vulnerable radiant" entry which gives some other rider like slowed or loses insubstantial until end of next turn.

Something like that but specifically for turn undead would be awesome for flavor, story, and make the cleric feel boss, right? Well it turns out there might be some problems with that idea. After talking it over with people, some of which think differently than me (seriously,...

On June 22nd we sat down with Rich Baker to have a live chat about the new D&D strategy board game, Conquest of Nerath. Below is the transcript of that chat.

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WotC_RichBaker: While we're getting ready, let me begin with a brief bio. I'm Rich Baker, a game designer here at Wizards of the Coast. I've been with the company (and TSR before that) since 1991. Some of my recent D&D work includes the Dark Sun Campaign Setting, the current D&D Encounters season, Dark Legacy of Evard, and other 4e sourcebooks. I'm also an author, mostly of Forgotten Realms novels, most recently the Swordmage, Corsair, and Avenger series.

I did my initial work on Conquest of Nerath all the way back in the spring of 2005, when I was assigned the job of creating a D&D strategy board game.

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Hello from Gen-Con again all! We started playing some Castle Ravenloft on the train trip down here, and once we started posting up pictures and tweeting what we were doing, people wanted more. So it seemed like a good idea to give you what you wanted.

I sat down with Dave Chalker and Danny Rupp of critical-hits.com and we opened up a fresh Castle Ravenloft and ran through the contents while talking about the various aspects of the game. And lucky for you, I remembered to tape it. So without too much more preamble, here you go:

If you're having trouble viewing these for whatever reasons, you can also find them on youtube here and here.

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Hopefully you've had a chance to check out the Movie Quote Powers article that was posted up today. While these are just something we're doing for April 1st - it's definitely a lot of fun to create movie quote based powers! We had a blast throwing out suggestions and ideas in Dave the Game's Warlords in the Movies article, and I'd like to do that again. I'll start things off with one that Bart Carroll threw my way:

This is Spinal Tap

 

So there's a start. Leave a comment below with the power stats and and fluff for your favorite movie quote, and I'll drop it into the power format add them to this blog. Let's see how many new powers we can come up with picking from our favorites and AFI's Top 100 Quotes!

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I've taken the movie quote powers from the comments

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Last week we sent a broadcast to all D&D group members concerning some information on a D&D miniatures surprise that we mentioned at D&D XP. For all of those who missed it and for everyone who hasn't joined the group yet, I've reposted the message below. Make sure to join the D&D group to catch any future sneak peeks.

At D&D Experience we talked about a special D&D Miniatures release that is coming later this year. I'm here to spill the beans on that product. The mystery miniatures release that we've been hinting at is the Beholder Collector’s Set. Here's the information I can reveal now: 

• There will be 4 Beholder minis packaged in a swanky display case.
• There are 3 brand new Beholder species that haven't been released in any previous minis sets.
• The Collector's Set will be very limited

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Be prepared, this is me acting as a bearer of a small amount of bad news. As some people have noticed, the Robot Chicken D&D videos haven't been showing up in the podcast feed since episode 10. Because of the size and quality of the videos, we're finding it easier to host them only on our site or through youtube. So for the time being at least, you can catch Perkins and the writers of Robot Chicken playing D&D on our site. Next time, I'll do my best to get you this information before a change like this happens.

 

Trevor Kidd is the D&D Community Manager, D&D goob, and if the stories are to be believed, an okay guy when the Illithids give him a rest. He's only been killed once when performing the "bearer of bad news" capacity of his position.

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Every time a new class, build, feat, power or any other feature comes out for Dungeons & Dragons, it's inevitable that somebody will say something along the lines of "I could have done that better." Well my friends, this is your chance to prove it!

Building Character articles will introduce new, undeveloped character features that we can dissect, update, and develop into working features for use in our games. The features discussed in these articles are not official D&D material. They have not gone through the normal design and development process, and we shouldn't expect to see these in any of our printed material.

If something from a Building Character article finds it's way into Dragon magazine or a printed book, know that someone performed some kind of limited wish ritual and we all

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This fall we'll get our first real look at the Dungeons & Dragons Essentials line. These Essentials will provide a good place for new players to start while giving experienced players expanded options like new class builds, powers, and feats. The Dungeon Master's Kitis the Essentials product that is most likely to become the DMs best friend.

In last weeks Ampersand article, Bill described the basic components of the DM Kit:

For Dungoen Masters, the boxed Dungeons Master's Kit expands the DMing material presented in the "Red Box," as well as two adventures, two poster maps, a DM's screen and monster tokens to help a DM take a campaign from 1st to 30th level.

Let's go ahead and get a bit more specfic on that "DMing Material" part with some information stollen directly from Andy Collins'

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