Encounter-a-Day

In light of the news that Wizards of the Coast is coming out with their own fully-featured Monster Maker application for D&D Insider, I’ve decided to discontinue support of Monster Maker. I will be leaving it up on my website in its current state for those who wish to download it, but I will not be making any further updates.

It’s been just over a year since I released version 1.0 of the program shortly after D&D 4e itself was released, and it’s been a great and rewarding experience. I want to thank everyone who used the program for helping to make it what it was. Without your feedback, bug reports, feature suggestions, and kind words I would not have been able to make it as far as I have.

With all that said, I’m really overextended with all the things I’m trying to support and motivation to program has been in extremely short supply. Dropping support for Monster Maker will allow me– when the desire strikes– to focus on my other projects.

Even though the program is officially “dead,” I do feel I should point out that it’s still as good as it ever was, for better or worse. It certainly has some bugs left and things which could be improved, but it’s also in a perfectly stable state and perfectly capable of creating monstrosities to challenge your players.

For those of you without a D&D Insider account who would like something in active development, I’ll go ahead and recommend Dungeon Mastering Tools.

Once more, thank you to all my users, and I’m sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.

Hidden deep in the Hanomae Tundra, a sword juts into the air, embedded in the permafrost. Beneath it, a dark shape like an elongated, massive head can just be made out through the cloudy ice. In fact, if one were able to get a view of the ground from the air, a dragon-like shape would be clearly evident.

If the sword is removed from the ice–no small feat, mind you–a sequence of events begins which cannot be averted. First, the wound in the dragon’s head rapidly closes, preventing the sword from being replaced. Next, two dull glows appear on the sides of its head as its eyes open again for the first time in millennia. The ground begins to shake as the long-dormant dragon awakens and tests its icy prison. Cracks appear in the permafrost; it is clear the dragon will not remain entombed much longer.

How does the dragon react to the PCs? How and why was it entombed in the first place? What will it do now that it has been released?

I’ve updated my random encounter generator so that it uses all the data from the Wizards of the Coast database.

Will be working on updating the other tools as time allows. I think that was the most popular of them, in any case.

At the moment, I’m caching the table on my local server. Some time in the future I’ll probably start requesting directly from WotC’s server, which will let me do keyword filtering and such… but in the meantime, I think this is a good compromise and it should save them bandwidth and you waiting time.

If you were brave and foolish enough to travel through Argonneson– and powerful or lucky enough to survive your travels– you might come across a ravine many hundreds of feet deep. And if you were to look inside that ravine, you’d notice two bizarre things.

First, there is the orrery. Massive spheres of stone float in the air, seemingly suspended. Though you’d likely never notice it, the spheres are in fact moving. Each of them is keyed to a different plane, and the orrery tracks the location and movement of the planes with respect to each other and Eberron itself.

Second, you’d notice the walls of the ravine lined with anywhere from many dozen to several hundred dragons. Much like the orrery, the dragons themselves seem to be unmoving and lifeless; the only evidence to the contrary is when one of them raises a strange pipe to its mouth and inhales deeply. You’d never see the dragon exhale, though, but if you’re observant you might notice fine wisps of smoke escaping its nostrils.

The dragons here are under the influence of a narcotic called omen weed which grows near the ravine. Their dragonborn attendants dutifully harvest the drug and deliver it to the massive, furnace-like hookahs. Each hookah has dozens of pipes, each running to a languishing dragon.

The drug alters its users sense of time and space, which the dragons find helpful in their study of the orrery’s glacially-slow movements. Many dragons spend years, decades, even centuries constantly under the effect of the omen weed, losing touch with the world around them as they commune with the draconic prophecy.

If you ever encounter a member of the Grimscythe tribe, the first thing you’re likely to notice is that his arms are covered in scars and open wounds. Like many of the western orc tribes, the Grimscythe are cannibalistic. What sets them apart, though, is their practice of autophagia.

In battle, the Grimscythe orcs will literally tear off strips of their own flesh. The pain and adrenaline fuels them as their own blood drips from their mouths, and the mere sight of an eight-foot tall orc chewing on his own flesh as he barrels down at you is enough to rout all but the most grizzled veterans.

So to cut a short (but uninteresting) story even shorter, I stumbled onto a way to get XML results from Compendium searches, opening the door for people to run queries against the compendium programatically. For example, I’ve just updated my Monster Maker with the ability to search the compendium for monsters and import them (this was previously available, but more complicated as you had to save the monsters to an HTML file and then import that…).

So without further ado, here’s the key:

http://www.wizards.com/dndinsider/compendium/CompendiumSearch.asmx/KeywordSearch

You can query that URL using either GET or POST If you don’t know what those are, you’re probably best off using GET, which I’ll describe.

The two parameters which seem to be necessary are “Keywords” and “tab” (I don’t think case matters, but that’s the case I’m using and it works…). Keywords is what you’re searching for, and tab is the type of results you want.

For example, to search for mind flayers, you’d look up:

http://www.wizards.com/dndinsider/compendium/CompendiumSearch.asmx/KeywordSearch?Keywords=mind%20flayers&tab=Monster

Note that the space was escaped to %20. I’m pretty sure you can NOT replace spaces with +. I haven’t tried dashes or underscores.

And that brings up a nice little XML document ready to be fed into whatever silly machinery you’re working on.

Also note that each entry has an associated ID. You can use that ID to find the page for the specific element. In the case of monsters, you use…

http://www.wizards.com/dndinsider/compendium/monster.aspx?id=[insert ID here]

For example, the Mind Flayer Infiltrator is ID 339, so its page is

http://www.wizards.com/dndinsider/compendium/monster.aspx?id=339

The URLs for other elements are…

http://www.wizards.com/dndinsider/compendium/race.aspx?id=
http://www.wizards.com/dndinsider/compendium/class.aspx?id=
http://www.wizards.com/dndinsider/compendium/glossary.aspx?id=
http://www.wizards.com/dndinsider/compendium/deity.aspx?id=
http://www.wizards.com/dndinsider/compendium/item.aspx?id=
http://www.wizards.com/dndinsider/compendium/monster.aspx?id=
http://www.wizards.com/dndinsider/compendium/epicdestiny.aspx?id=
http://www.wizards.com/dndinsider/compendium/paragonpath.aspx?id=
http://www.wizards.com/dndinsider/compendium/ritual.aspx?id=
http://www.wizards.com/dndinsider/compendium/feat.aspx?id=
http://www.wizards.com/dndinsider/compendium/skill.aspx?id=
http://www.wizards.com/dndinsider/compendium/power.aspx?id=

For some info on actually running queries, check out Gaming in Code, a blog run by one of the guys working on DDI. I haven’t tested to make sure that all those filters and such actually work with this, but I strongly suspect they do.

I’ve updated Monster Maker to 3.6. You can now search the D&D Insider Compendium from within Monster Maker, and import monsters directly from it.

Those of you who have the auto-updating version should get it next time you start it (if you haven’t already!). Otherwise you can download it now from here.

The standalone version will be available in a few days after I’ve given any bugs a chance to show their ugly head and be squished.

Teleportation magic is a convenient, but also costly and dangerous. Any meaningful teleportation requires powerful magic, and even then it’s not perfectly reliable– especially if one doesn’t know the destination already.

Teleportation circles, then, are a wonderful innovation for a magical society. The size of teleportation circles ranges from a few feet to several yards in diameter, and they are solid stone disks engraved with sigils of precious metals and inlaid gemstones. A circle acts as a lodestone, naturally attracting teleportation magic to itself. With knowledge of the particular sigils, it’s all but impossible for a teleportation spell to fail or misdirect.

Like teleportation magic itself, though, the circles are a double-edged sword. The precious metals and gems used in their construction are natural targets for thieves, and their very nature makes the circles potential invasion points for enemies. Thus, most teleportation circles are guarded around the clock. For public circles, such as those just outside the walls of most major cities, the guards also collect taxes from inbound travelers. Those unable or unwilling to pay the levies find themselves arrested and/or their goods confiscated.

Even though the magic requires to go from one teleportation circle to another is relatively simple, not everyone has access to their own caster to take care of it. Thus, most public circles also have a mage on hand whose services can be hired. Unlike guards, very few circles have a mage available at all hours of day and in fact most likely only have one around during the busiest part of the day. Though not very glamorous, “Portal Magister” is a common vocation for young mages working their way through school or recent graduates without better prospects.

Also common around teleportation circles are vendors who sell “sigil directories,” scrolls or books with lists of sigils for many common destinations. One should be careful, however, to ensure that they only purchase such directories from reputable dealers. It is all too easy to fake a directory for some easy gold or even sabotage one to lure unsuspecting travelers into traps.

Private teleportation circles also exist. Most castles have them, as do some of the wealthiest individuals. Needless to say, the sigils for such private circles are guarded carefully. For individuals, frequently only the owner knows them and for castles the information is limited to a small handful of loyal– and well-paid– portal magisters. Those expected to have legitimate use of the castle’s circle– such as a military commander or a diplomat– might be entrusted with a portal magister as an attendant.

One common safeguard for private circles is to create two circles with nearly-identical sigils. One is safe and the other booby-trapped. The sigils are created such that the safe one is much more exact and finer in detail than the false one, such that if a mistake is made it will most likely end up with the travelers being sent to the booby-trapped circle.

I’m pleased to announce the release of Digital Squire, my new D&D 4th Edition player aid with tight D&D Insider integration. Load your character made with the DDI Character Builder, keep track of your status throughout the game, and look up your powers and items in the DDI Compendium right from the program!

What you’re looking at there is the beta of my latest project, Digital Squire.

Digital Squire is intended to be a replacement for character sheets, used by PCs at the table. It keeps track of powers, healing surges and hit points (including temporary hp). It allows you to look up any power in the D&D Insider Compendium (which only works if you’ve got a subscription, of course), as well as your class or anything else in the compendium.

It can also roll skill checks for you, optionally roll attacks for you, and has a little box in the lower left corner to make quick custom rolls.

Best of all, it loads files from the D&D Insider Character Builder! It also allows you to save your characters current state, so that you can be ready to use it next session.

Most features are there, but it’s still missing a lot. However, it should be mostly usable right now.

Let me know what you think! Please, if you have any suggestions for features you’d like to see, let me know. If you find any bugs, let me know. If you have any comments, let me know. Etc, etc.

Download Digital Squire Beta now.