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.

Hardened Chuul

Their love of wealth and ale makes Dwarves even more fond of gambling than most other races, and dwarven culture is filled with a wide variety of gambling games. The traditional dwarven deck of card has four suits–anvils, hammers, flames and gems– each with thirteen ranks. The cards are numbered from one to ten, and the three remaining cards are the wall, the prince and the king.

But most unusual about dwarves are their dice games. Six-sided dice are common throughout the lands, but dwarvish craftsmanship has given rise to exotic sets of multi-faceted dice. A typical set of hommdar, or “dwarf’s dice,” consists of a four-, a six-, an eight-, a twelve- and a twenty-sided die.

Hommdar are used almost exclusively in dwarvish games; some human collectors procure them at great cost but usually as a curiosity and with no intent of actually using them. Simple stone hommdar are fairly common among dwarves, and more elaborate and durable metallic or gemstone sets are frequently passed down along family lines. Such heirloom sets are called “gal hommdar.”

One popular game using a set of hommdar is “The Pits,” popular because the rules are simple enough even after a few-too-many flagons of mead. The Pits can be played with any number of participants, but games are usually played with between three and five.

To start, each player antes in a copper coin or some other agreed upon amount to the pot. Then each player rolls their d20. The player who rolled the highest without being tied loses, and replaces their d20 with a d12.

Players continue in rounds like this, and each time the loser goes to the next die; d20 -> d12 -> d8 -> d6 -> d4. If a player loses on a d4, that player’s out. When all but one player has been eliminated, that player wins the pot.

Each of the dice in The Pits is given a name. The d4 is the dwarf, the d6 the ogre, the d8 the human, the d12 the elf, and the d20 is the gnome (because, “Everybody hates the gnome.”).

This game has a number of regional variations, including a faster-playing variant called Elf Pit where the first player to be eliminated wins the pot and one called Reverse Pit where the order of the dice is reversed, players start with a d4, and it’s the lowest roll (without being tied) which loses each round.

Just wanted to spread the word about this 4e Style Guide put together by Icosahedrophilia. Helps maintain consistency without having to constantly reference the books and see how WotC did things.

MPTW (Formerly: MonkeyPirate TiddlyWiki) is absolutely amazing for making campaign sites. The really key feature to it is TagglyTagging. What’s TagglyTagging? Well, I could tell you, but it’s a lot easier to show you. Here’s the site for a campaign I ran last year.

See that gorgeous, hierarchical menu? How much time do you think I spent in building and organizing it? What if I told you none. No time whatsoever. That menu is generated automatically, and it updates whenever you add new stuff. It’s the magic of TagglyTagging!

MPTW is a flavor of TiddlyWiki, which are kind of like midget wikis on crack. A TiddlyWiki is entirely contained in a single HTML file and thus is great for keeping notes and such on a flashdrive or what have you, but it also means you can upload them to literally any webhost. Since it’s all done in HTML and Javascript, you don’t need anything fancy to run it. Actually updating it online can be a bit sticky, depending on your route, but let’s take this one step at a time.

Getting your MPTW

First, let’s get you started. You have three options here, assuming you want to display your MPTW online.

• The easiest thing to do is to go to Tiddlyspot and sign up for a free hosted one. Make sure you choose MPTW when you make it. You’ll be given an address along the lines of “name.tiddlyspot.com” from which you can update the page, and that’s also the address you give to people to view it.
  Pros
  • Easy, free and seamless to use
  • Update anywhere

  Cons

  • Can only use Tiddlyspot to host it.
  • Server can be slow sometimes.
• The next easiest thing to do is to just use the MPTW as normal and upload the HTML file to your webhost of choice. This isn’t quite as seamless as the above option, since you need to manually upload the file whenever you want to put up the latest version.
  Pros
  • Free
  • Works with any host

  Cons

  • Slightly less straightforward in day-to-day use
  • Worse chance of forgetting to update the live page, of uploading an outdated version, etc
• Finally, if you’ve got access to a host with PHP, you can set it up to upload to your own server. The initial setup takes a tiny bit of technical know-how, but once you’ve got it running it’s just as seamless as on Tiddlyspot and you’ve got it on your own server, which is always nice. If you’re interested in going this route, there’s an awesome tutorial at Tiddlywiki.org on getting UploadPlugin running on your MPTW and your server.
  Pros
  • You have complete control
  • Address is whatever you want it to be– you could even have www.mycampaign.com if you were so inclined.

  Cons

  • Requires a host with PHP.
  • Some technical knowledge required to get it running.

Please note that for the last two, you’ll need to download an empty MPTW. To download it, just open that page and save it to your local hard drive wherever you choose. Important note: Make sure you save as HTML only, not complete webpage.

By the way, you don’t have to call it “empty.html.” You can name it whatever you want, the only important thing is that it ends in .html.

And, of course, you could always just forego the online stuff altogether and just use a local copy. Particularly handy for playing around with things or for keeping personal notes.

Diving into the wonderful world of TiddlyWikis

So now we’ve got an empty MPTW. Kind of intimidating, eh, like staring at a test that’s just been laid out in front of you.

Well, what’s the first you do on a test? Write your name! Not strictly necessary, but whatever name you put in here will be recorded whenever you make changes to tiddlers. I like actually having my name there, instead of “YourName” appearing everywhere.

Now that we’ve provided our name, how about providing the MPTW with one as well? Clicking the “SiteTitle” link will open the SiteTitle tiddler, which is a special, magical tiddler. Well, not magical, but special nonetheless. As the name implies, this is where you put your MPTW’s name!

Now, just double click on that tiddler and it will change into an edit box. This works for all tiddlers, by the way.

So now it’s pretty straight-forward. Just type in a name, hover your mouse near the top of the tiddler and click done. Couldn’t be simpl–baWHA?!?

ZOMG THEY’RE HAX0RING ME! No, no, calm down. This is normal. See, JavaScript is a pretty powerful language, but traditionally it’s limited by the fact that it can only run in your browser. The TiddlyWiki uses some dark mojo to allow it to save itself, however, and this box is just warning you that it’s trying to write to your disk which is something you usually do not want JavaScript to be able to do.

So to recap, in general, be very, very worried about that message. Never take it lightly. In this case, just trust Ol’ Uncle Asmor when he says it’s safe.

(p.s. If you don’t see this security warning, that’s fine too. This will only appear if you’re editing it on your local hard drive).

So where were we? Oh, right, after you accept that message, the site’s renamed!

Now we’re done with this tiddler. Whenever you hover the mouse near the top of a tiddler, a menu will appear. Do that now and click ‘Close’ to close this tiddler.

Now go ahead and do the same thing with SiteSubtitle. You can always just make it blank, too.

Now we get to the good stuff. Go ahead and open DefaultTiddlers. This is a list of tiddlers that will be opened when someone comes to our MPTW. Usually I like to have one “home” tiddler that’s open by default, but you can have as many as you want or even none.

For now, just go ahead and edit the DefaultTiddlers so that it says [[Home]].

The double set of square brackets mean that this word should be treated as a link to a tiddler. You can also make tiddlers by CombiningWordsLikeThis. Personally, I find that really annoying, and I like the flexibility that the bracket syntax gives, such as allowing spaces in tiddlers.

You’ll notice that after you save this tiddler, the link to “Home” is italicized instead of bold. This is a visual cue that you’ve specified a tiddler which doesn’t exist yet. This is great for two reasons.

First, it makes it really convenient to do things freeform– say you’re typing out a description of some mountains, and you realize you should add in something about your Granite Dwarves. Just write something like “The Granite Mountains are also the home of the [[Granite Dwarves]].” Then when you save it, you can click that link to open a new tiddler called Granite Dwarves and start right where you left off.

Second, and equally important, it helps you avoid typos and maintain consistency. Say later on you’re working on the Pine Elves and you write something like, “The Pine Elves have an eternal enmity with the [[Granite Dwarfs]].” When you save that, it’s going to be italicized because that tiddler doesn’t exist yet. You do a double-take and realize that you used a different form of plural than you’d been using, go back and edit it, and everyone’s happy! YAY!

Let’s go ahead and edit that home tiddler so we’ve got something there.

Now’s a great time to save and try this out. If you’re editing this on your hard drive, it’s probably been saving automatically after you edit each tiddler. If you’re doing it online, it hasn’t saved anything yet. Regardless, now’s a great time to learn how to save.

Near the top on the right side, you’ll see a menu. Click save changes if you’re editing it on your hard drive; if you’re using TiddlySpot.org, click “Save to Web” (it might ask you to enter your password if you haven’t already). If you did this on your own site, follow the same steps as when you uploaded your MPTW before.

Go ahead and reload (F5) your MPTW to see how the default tiddlers work. If everything went according to plan, Home should be the only tiddler you see.

Let’s get some actual content in there. Hover your mouse near the top of the Home tiddler and click “new here.” This will create a new tiddler which is tagged as “Home.”

What I like to do is have a few top-level organizational tiddlers with little to no content, which only serve to provide a structure to the MPTW. Some common ones I’ll have include

• Campaign Journals
• PCs
• NPCs
• Races
• Geography

I’m going to call this new tiddler “NPCs” and leave it completely blank for now.

Now I’ll go ahead and add a couple more. I can always add others later.

Now here’s where some of the beauty of the TiddlyWiki really shines through… It’s infinitely expandable, and you can expand wherever you want as the mood suits you. Perfect for world building! At the moment, I feel like adding some info about the Granite Mountains and the Pine Forest, so I’ll open the Geography tiddler and add those two new tiddlers there.

Starting to get a bit cluttered, so hover near the top of the Home tiddler and choose “close others” to close all tiddlers except the Home tiddler.

Now it’s time for some magic! When you hover over the Home tiddler, next to “Tagged as ‘Home’” you should see a menu appear. The menu has six options.

• Title: This is selected by default and should have an up-arrow, meaning that the tiddlers are sorted by name in ascending order.
• Modified & Created: These two work just like title, allowing you to sort the tiddlers by when they were last modified or originally created, respectively.
• Group: This one actually changes every time you click it. It cycles through the various ways the tiddlers are displayed. Note that if you’ve been playing with your MPTW, this may say something different. That’s fine.
• Excerpts: Like Group above, this one cycles through a few different options. It changes how much of each of those tiddlers is displayed. By default, it just shows their titles, but you can go so far as including the entire tiddler!
• Cols: This is one you’re going to have to tweak a bit when you add new stuff. Every time you click it, it adds a column to the displayed tiddlers until it reaches a limit and goes back to one column. Basically, just keep pressing it until you find something you’re happy with.

For now, just click the ‘Group’ option until you get a sitemap. It should look something like this:

I’m going to go ahead and click cols a couple times to get the different tiddlers in their own columns, too.

By the way, don’t forget to save often. Don’t trust auto-saves or let them make you lazy!

Let’s say you’ve been working on this MPTW for a long time. You know you’ve had lots of ideas for tiddlers, which you threw in but haven’t gotten around to fleshing out, but you can’t remember what they were. Now, you could painstakingly trawl through dozens or hundreds of tiddlers trying to find those elusive and exciting italicized links, or you could let the MPTW do the work for you.

On the sidebar, there’s a big tabbed list of tiddlers. By default, it has “Timeline” open, which shows all the tiddlers by the date they were last modified. Click the “More” tab, and then click “Miss.”

This is a list of tiddlers which have been referred to somewhere, but haven’t been defined yet. You’ll notice that there’s a lot of garbage in there from various things. You can either ignore them, or even open them and save them as blank just to get them out of the list. I like to keep this list tidy, as it serves as both a to do list and also gives me ideas for what to write about when I’m stumped.

But for now, pretend all that garbage isn’t there. We notice there are two things listed which we referred to before– the Granite Dwarves and the Pine Elves. I’ll click the Granite Dwarves and start editing them.

Now, notice the tags below. Since I didn’t click “New Here” from another tiddler, I had to enter the tags manually. Tags are separated by spaces. For Races, I just entered “Races.” But since there’s a space in “Granite Mountains,” I needed to include the double square brackets.

I’ll go ahead and save that, and let’s see what’s happened to the Home tiddler.

Look at that, it added them under both Races and under Granite Mountains, even though Granite Mountains is itself a child tiddler.

Now, this might seem a bit redundant in this very anemic example, but I hope you can imagine how helpful this is in a more heavily-populated MPTW. Should you look for King Thatherton under NPCs or under the Kingdom of Thatherton? If he were only under one or the other, you might waste time searching, but this way you’re guaranteed to find him quickly and easily.

Let’s add an NPC. I’m going to open the Granite Dwarves, click new here, and make a new dwarf NPC.

Notice two things here. First, since I clicked New Here under Granite Dwarves, I needed to manually add the NPCs tag.

Second, you’ll see that I wrote //for a dwarf//. The double-slashes indicate that what’s inside of them should be italicized, like so:

Here’s some handy tips for marking up text in your MPTW:

• Bold: Double-apostrophes. ”This text would be bolded.”
• Italics: Double-slashes. //This text would be italicized.//
• Headers: Prepend the text with an exclamation point, e.g. !History
• Tables: Use pipes (that’s the | character you get by holding shift and pressing backslash) to separate each cell of the table, and put each row of the table on its own line. You can also make table headers by using exclamation points. Example:
  

  |!Table heading 1|!Table heading 2|
  |Contents of row 2, cell 1|Contents of row 2, cell 2|

Here’s a much fuller primer on TiddlyWiki Markup.

Well, there’s just one last thing to go over. I meant to go over it much sooner, but got a little caught up… Such is the danger of the TiddlyWiki!

Under your site’s title, you’ll see a link to the GettingStarted tiddler. Remember him? He was your guide in this scary new world of TiddlyWikis, and then after you got what you needed you just cast him aside like a weighted companion cube into an incinerator. But the GettingStarted tiddler isn’t quite done… The memory of him remains.

Click it again, and we can rid ourselves of his humble, helpful memory for good!

Now click on MainMenu. This tiddler is a lot like DefaultTiddlers; you put a list of tiddlers here. Rather than these being opened automatically, though, this is a list of tiddlers which will be displayed at the top underneath the MPTW’s name.

Go ahead and erase GettingStarted. Now he’s gone for good! In his place, put [[Home]], and optionally you can include other tiddlers as well. I frequently put all my “top-level” tiddlers which are tagged as Home in there as well, since they’re the things I usually want to be able to access quickly and easily.

Conclusion

Well, I hope you’ve found this helpful. I find the MPTW to be absolutely indispensible in world building, personally. You know how you can be reading Wikipedia and just get lost in references? Well, working on a MPTW is kind of like doing that in reverse. You write one thing which spawns ideas for two more tiddlers, each of which spawn ideas for two more tiddlers, and before you know you need to be up for work in an hour and a half.

Happy tiddling!

Just wanted to pass this along in case someone finds it useful.

Via freewaregenius, Storybook is some free, open source software specifically made for organizing plots. It has features to keep track of plot threads, characters, locations, who was where when, etc. Check out freewaregenius for a more in-depth review.

Seems like it would be useful for RPGs, too.

I’m considering running a western-fantasy D&D game, and what are cowboys without their guns?

New weapon qualities

Clip: After making an attack with a weapon with the clip property, roll the indicated die; if you roll a 1, the weapon is out of ammo and must be reloaded. Weapons with the clip property will always also have the load property, but you do not need to reload them until you roll a 1 on your clip die after an attack. You only roll the die once per attack power, after the power is completely done.

Spread: Whenever you make a ranged attack (yes, that means it has to be a ranged attack, not an area or close…) with a spread weapon and the attack has only a single target, if the attack hits then every creature adjacent to the target takes 1[W] damage. Increase this to 2[W] damage at 11th level and 3[W] damage at 21st level.

Unreliable: When making an attack roll with an unreliable weapon, if your natural d20 roll (before applying modifiers) is equal to or lower than the unreliable value given for the weapon, the weapon jams. You may not make any more attacks with the weapon again until you’ve spent a standard action clearing it. A weapon jamming does not prevent any portion of a given power from working, so for example if a power has a secondary attack and you jam while rolling for the primary attack you still get to make the secondary attack. In essence, the jamming doesn’t happen until after the attack is completely done. If you roll a jam but the attack would otherwise hit, it still hits as normal.

New weapons

Revolver

Simple one-handed ranged weapon
Damage: 1d8
Proficient: +2
Range: 15/30
Weight: 2 lb.

Properties:
Clip d6
Load Standard
Unreliable 2

Group:
Firearms

Rifle

Simple two-handed ranged weapon
Damage: 1d12
Proficient: +2
Range: 20/40
Weight: 7 lb.

Properties:
Load Move
Unreliable 3

Group:
Firearms

Shotgun

Simple two-handed ranged weapon
Damage: 2d4
Proficient: +2
Range: 3/6
Weight: 7 lb.

Properties:
Load Move
Unreliable 2
Spread

Group:
Firearms

New items

Ammo: ‘Nuff said

Speedloader: This circular bit of metal has six spots to hold ammo, and is designed to make it faster to reload a revolver. It takes a standard action to load a speedloader, but they may be loaded ahead of time. When using a speedloader to load a revolver, it takes a move action to load instead of a standard but the revolver’s unreliable rating increases by two points until the next time it’s reloaded.

New feats

Conservative Shot

Benefit: Once per encounter, when you roll a 1 on a clip die, you may reroll that die. You may also reroll a clip die by spending an action point.

Deadeye

Prerequisite: Weapon focus (firearms)
Benefit: You ignore the penalty for using a firearm at long range and treat all firearms as high crit weapons.

Rapid Reload

Prerequisite: Weapon focus (firearms)
Benefit: For the purpose of reloading firearms, you can spend a minor action as though it were a move action and you can spend a move action as though it were a standard action. For example, you can spend a move action to load a revolver, or spend a minor action to load one with a speedloader.

I’ve got some really good news for those of you who aren’t as big a fan of Windows as I am.

I’ve had two people confirm to me that Monster Maker seems to be working under the latest release of Mono on Linux. Presumably, this means it should work on Macs as well. I have no access to a Mac, so I can’t verify, but if anyone wants to give it a try and let me know (hint, hint), that’d be pretty cool.

Special thanks to Jason Ward, for bringing this to my attention, and Maarten Inklaar, for helping me iron out some platform-dependent issues.

One day, the PCs find an old doll while exploring an abandoned house. Whoever first touches the doll becomes cursed.

From then on, the doll will randomly appear around the cursed character, regardless of any precautions they may take against it. Destroying the doll or locking it away does not help.

When the doll makes an appearance, it is as though it had been lying there waiting for the PC. No one ever sees it appear. For example, it might be lying behind a tree in the woods or appear when the character wakes up in the morning half-sticking out from under the character’s bed, or sitting on the character’s nightstand as though watching her sleep.

The doll and its curse is completely harmless. If your PCs are so inclined, theoretically they could get the curse removed… But what fun is that?

Inspired by this Jonathan Coulton song

One common complaint about 4th edition is that combat can be a bit of a slog. Solos, in particular, are notorious for this problem. But sometimes, you just really want a big, climactic fight against one really nasty enemy.

What’s a DM to do? As always, we take out the one tool every DM should know how to use, more useful than duct tape, a dremel, a swiss army knife and a leatherman combined: theft.

In this case, we’re stealing from video games. A common staple in video games is the large, multi-part boss fight that changes periodically throughout.

Let me give you an example. I’m coming up to the climactic ending of my campaign. The big bad in question is actually rather small; a halfling-sized warforged named Judgment who is (quite successfully) summoning an entity from the far realms to devour the world.

Now, there are three obvious ways to turn him into the big bad.

1. 1. Make him a solo lurker and hope I can craft the terrain such that it’s an interesting fight. Not bloody likely.
2. 2. Turn him into a hulking monstrosity “because of the far realms taint.” Not terribly desirable, since it radically changes the concept of the character.
3. 3. Make him an elite and surround him with a a more standard encounter. Yawn.

No, no, no. That just won’t do. You see, it’s important to me that the PCs get to fight Judgment as… Judgment. Without getting into detail, suffice to say that a couple of the PCs have a specific and personal (to the players even more so than the characters) vendetta against Judgment as he is.

I also want to make sure that the fight is different and interesting. And so I brainstormed, and here’s what I’ve come up with.

The fight starts off fairly normal. Judgment is just a plain old lurker, not even elite, with a couple warforged and illithids and maybe an umberhulk. When Judgment is destroyed, he shatters into dozens of shards. Hooray, they got to kill the real Judgment!

After the last of the enemies are defeated, however, and before the PCs can take a rest, the shards begin to regenerate into a small army of Judgments. In this form, Judgment is represented as a couple dozen minions, with the nasty ability that every round any one of the minions can deliver a very powerful attack.

Finally, after they defeat the split Judgment, all the pieces coalesce back together into a more abstract, crystalline form. This is Judgment’s final form, and his most difficult. He is now an elite controller who radically alters the way the battles go, drastically reducing healing, making PCs attack each other, and only being hit by rolling under his defense.

I hope this post has inspired you. Provided below are Judgment’s stats in each form.

Actually, as I write this addendum (which technically isn’t an addendum since as far as you’re concerned this all went live at the same time), I’ve just finished this fight. It worked out really well, minus some design issues with the last form of Judgment. The PCs were actually rolling too reliably and having a hard time missing him, and on top of that the basic attack thing wasn’t doing much damage. Turned it into a bit of a slog, so after a few rounds I decided to just end it there.

Other than that, though, I think the multi-part boss idea worked beautifully.