Torinn Sca'Dalen (DoNA)

From Donaar out of Thava Dala'Kolgrenath, Torinn can trace his ancestry back to the heyday of the Arkhosian Empire. Those unlucky enough to challenge him on it discover quickly that he can do it from memory and that a full recitation (it would be disrespectful to the ancestors to stop without properly recognizing all of them once begun) takes approximately half and hour.

What Torinn doesn't mention as he recites his lineage, is that each generation back toward the Arkosia of Old seems like a better generation. Torinn knows a considerable amount of his own family history and the lesson he has taken from it is that his family and Dragonborn in general have fallen a long way from their past of grandeur.

Torinn has made it his life goal to set an example of the best of what it is to be Dragonborn. He has entered into the most difficult service he could find. He is a Paladin of the Platinum Dragon. He stands as an example of the honor, bravery and valor of lost Arkhosia.

Dawn Of A New Age Campaign

We're launching the Dawn of a New Age campaign this weekend on 6/21. This campaign will be based on the brand new 4th Edition D&D. The campaign will be based on the canonical modules that Wizards will be releasing over the next year taking characters from 1st through 30th level.

The plan is to run this campaign in a much more distributed fashion. The five characters who are launching their adventuring their careers won't belong to any particular players. Players can trade them off from game session to game session. We'll play the campaign whenever we can get a group together to play. The adventures will be chronicled here on the blog so that everyone who is participating in the campaign in general can keep up with what is going on if they can't make a particular game. Ultimately, I can see trading off DM'ing an encounter or even an entire module if there are people interested in having that side of the experience.

Gygax Tributes

Below are various links to Gygax tributes that I've run across.

Penny Arcade
Order of the Stick
Full Frontal Nerdity
Nodwick
Dork Tower
Wil Wheaton
Time Magazine
Uncle Monster
xkcd

4E Hype

Fourth Edition D&D hits the shelves on June 6 2008. There a lot of hype on the net. Hard to find the real story. Here's some relatively authentic sounding articles.

Wired
This one includes links to pictures of actual (from Wizards but maybe not final) 4E character sheets.

Ain't It Cool News [1][2][3]
A three part review from some one who was in a play testing group. This one is pretty interesting. He says he started off not wanting to like 4E but ended up really liking it for the speed of play. Something we've been looking for.

Geekdad
A less informative piece, but does contain links to some Wizards books that are essentially design diaries from the 4E game designers. For people interested in what they were thinking. The books supposedly contain no information at all about actual game mechanics.

Some Gygax Thoughts

I saw him once at Origins. I didn't immediately know who he was. He was standing at the New Infinities booth. He was having a conversation with someone. I don't know who. He caught my attention because people kept walking up to him and handing him first edition rule books. He would take them, without pausing his conversation, sign them, and hand them back. This happened several times and I was forced to wonder who this guy was. I looked at him closely, thought, he looked a little like George Lucas, and then it occurred to me that it must be Gary Gygax. I regret to this day that I didn't have any of my rule books with me.

I have three generations of friends that I've accumulated in my life purely by playing D&D. All great people. I sincerely believe that I owe what I consider my above average vocabulary to reading Gary Gygax's sesquipedalian writing style. The fact that my SAT verbal score was higher than my SAT math score can be traced in part to my days playing the game.

Gary, hekatombs and libations to you! You changed the world and positively influenced the lives of countless people. When my time is done, I could not hope to have accomplished anything better.

Hail and Farewell: E. Gary Gygax

I know that many of us have been D+D nerds for many years.
I played in my first adventure in 1978, now nearly 30 *gasp* years ago.

Without E. Gary, many of us would have had productive adolesences,
young adulthoods and now, adulthoods. Happily this is not the case.

If you find the time, remember E. Gary and the other dreamers who
morphed MERP into a usuable system for pencil & paper adventuring.
I can say for a certainty that my creativity as an adult was greatly
fostered by the imagination workouts I underwent as a youth.

Hail and Farewell!

Age of Worms Scheduled to Play

The AoW campaign is scheduled to play on 2/20 at Bart's.