Thar be Pirates!
It's been a busy week at work once again, leaving me very little time for endulging in geekish pleasures. My visiting friend and I did manage to sqeeze in one last game of Warmachine before he left town, bringing an end to our best-of-three tournament. He won in the end, but the last game was our best yet. The final turn could have went either way, and ultimately came down to the luck of the dice. The big learning breaktrough in this game was when my friend discovered the joys of two-handed throwing my arc node around the battlefield with his Slayer, inventing the sport of 'Jack Bowling.
With him gone again, I've been moving back into developing my D&D campaign. I run an Eberron game about once a week, and we're in the middle of running a heavily-modified version of the Eyes of the Lich Queen module. We are just wrapping up the first act, about to head off and explore the Lhazaar Principalities. It just happens that one of our characters is also a Lhazaaran, and has quite a few unresolved "issues" lurking in her backstory. We are going to take advantage situation and make a few little side excursions to bring some of these to closure.
If you aren't familiar with Eberron, the Lhazaar principalities are pirate islands, and considering we were going to be spending some time there, I wanted to take full advantage of such a fun setting. Unfortunately, there isn't a lot of background on Lhazaar in the sourcebooks, so I went looking elsewhere for pirate-y goodness. Eventually I came across Green Ronin's Pirate's Guide to Freeport. I'd heard about Freeport here and there, and the reviews had all been good, so I took a chance and ordered a copy.
The book showed up earlier this week, and I've got to say, it's awesome. It's by far one of the best "flavor" books I own. It covers the pirate city of Freeport, and is built in such a way that you could play it as a stand-alone campaign setting, or drop it into any existing campaign with very little work. The world they create is rich and intriguing, and does an great job of blending swashbuckling pirate fiction with the classic high-fantasy of D&D. On top of that, it has a bunch of really nice art from Wayne Reynolds, who is my absolute favorite.
I assume because of the looming threat that is Fourth Edition, Green Ronin took a little different approach with The Pirate's Guide to Freeport - they made it system-less. That right - it's a great big book with nary a stat block in sight. Instead, they focused on just giving us the historical and descriptive stuff in this book, and they plan on releasing additional books with system-specific information later (the first two being a True20 and a d20 companion.)
Truth be told, I like this approach to producing game books much better. I'm pretty balanced in my appreciation of crunch vs. fluff, but I realized that I don't particularly like them mixed up together. I found myself wishing that more gaming books were built this way - setting books full of fluff and rich descriptions while the cruchy books could just be reference tomes of prestige classes, feats and spells. Iron Kingdoms did a very similar thing with their Character Guide and World Guide, and I really like how they turned out.
It also made me realize how stale the WotC stuff is becoming. It seems that WotC has been taken over by the rule designers, and the imagination of the products is suffering. Even the new modules focus heavily on providing a string of detailed tactical encounters rather than engaging plots with facinating charcters. As I've read through Freeport and the first four installments of Paizo's Pathfinder series, it makes me remember what I enjoyed about running games in the first place.
With him gone again, I've been moving back into developing my D&D campaign. I run an Eberron game about once a week, and we're in the middle of running a heavily-modified version of the Eyes of the Lich Queen module. We are just wrapping up the first act, about to head off and explore the Lhazaar Principalities. It just happens that one of our characters is also a Lhazaaran, and has quite a few unresolved "issues" lurking in her backstory. We are going to take advantage situation and make a few little side excursions to bring some of these to closure.
If you aren't familiar with Eberron, the Lhazaar principalities are pirate islands, and considering we were going to be spending some time there, I wanted to take full advantage of such a fun setting. Unfortunately, there isn't a lot of background on Lhazaar in the sourcebooks, so I went looking elsewhere for pirate-y goodness. Eventually I came across Green Ronin's Pirate's Guide to Freeport. I'd heard about Freeport here and there, and the reviews had all been good, so I took a chance and ordered a copy.The book showed up earlier this week, and I've got to say, it's awesome. It's by far one of the best "flavor" books I own. It covers the pirate city of Freeport, and is built in such a way that you could play it as a stand-alone campaign setting, or drop it into any existing campaign with very little work. The world they create is rich and intriguing, and does an great job of blending swashbuckling pirate fiction with the classic high-fantasy of D&D. On top of that, it has a bunch of really nice art from Wayne Reynolds, who is my absolute favorite.
I assume because of the looming threat that is Fourth Edition, Green Ronin took a little different approach with The Pirate's Guide to Freeport - they made it system-less. That right - it's a great big book with nary a stat block in sight. Instead, they focused on just giving us the historical and descriptive stuff in this book, and they plan on releasing additional books with system-specific information later (the first two being a True20 and a d20 companion.)
Truth be told, I like this approach to producing game books much better. I'm pretty balanced in my appreciation of crunch vs. fluff, but I realized that I don't particularly like them mixed up together. I found myself wishing that more gaming books were built this way - setting books full of fluff and rich descriptions while the cruchy books could just be reference tomes of prestige classes, feats and spells. Iron Kingdoms did a very similar thing with their Character Guide and World Guide, and I really like how they turned out.
It also made me realize how stale the WotC stuff is becoming. It seems that WotC has been taken over by the rule designers, and the imagination of the products is suffering. Even the new modules focus heavily on providing a string of detailed tactical encounters rather than engaging plots with facinating charcters. As I've read through Freeport and the first four installments of Paizo's Pathfinder series, it makes me remember what I enjoyed about running games in the first place.
Labels: Dungeons and Dragons, Eberron, miniatures, RPGs, Warmachine
