Announced in the last week or so, the WotC Virtual Table is now in beta; although it is refreshingly free of most of the features you’d expect a virtual table to have, it seems sensible to assume we can expect these holes to be filled in over time, and over the coming months it’ll become a very useful tool.
Masterplan version 9.9 has been released and can be downloaded from the website.
WotC Dungeon Tiles series of products are a great, inexpensive, and very flexable way of building maps for the encounters in a D&D game. They eliminate the need for artistic skills while presenting a very nice looking, immersive playfield for the game. But beyond a couple of pits , stairways, and dias tiles, there is no depth in the tiles, your map is pretty much limited to one flat level.
In the last few days, Wizards of the Coast have broken the news that the DDI Character Builder will be discontinued in its current, downloadable form, and replaced by a Silverlight character builder which will be accessed from the WotC website.
It’s fair to say that there has been a certain level of reaction from DDI subscribers in response to this news.
Jeff Greiner’s interview with Masterplan, recorded a few weeks ago, has been released; you can find it here.
In this second post, I’ll continue on the process of how Eteminaki, the Citadel of Ancient Doom! was conceptualized, and the key role that Masterplan played in the process.
A catchy theme and a cool look
My mega-dungeon needed an overarching theme, something that would tie together the different pieces of it, give it a consistent feel, and give the players something to identify with. Very quickly I decided that a ancient Mesopotamian-type feel, mixed liberally with Arabian Nights-style sensibility and narrative color, was what interested me.
I do not claim to be an expert in dungeon design of any variety, let alone mega-dungeons. I cut my game mastering teeth on Traveler, Middle-Earth Role-playing, Shadowrun, and many other games, but between a couple of months playing through “Keep on the Borderlands” circa 1983 with 1st Edition Advanced, and the release of version 3.0, I had nothing to do with D&D or dungeons of any sort.