When it comes to magic items, PCs are serial monogamists, leaping from weapon to weapon in short intense flings.

In my Blacktree game, I decided to change this a little bit.  Many of the items are disposable, but certain items I “level up” as the game progresses.

Submitted for evidence: Cracklemaw.  Our paladin got this lightning sword at about third level, and now that he’s pushing 8th, the sword has gained a +1, and now can deal radiant damage in addition to the lightning damage.  The last level up occurred right after slaying a black dragon in the climactic fight of an adventure.  Matt, the player, definitely is looking forward to having a holy avenger, and he’ll get it –but it will have been by his side for almost the entire campaign.  Cracklemaw will grow in power and “personality” along with his deeds. 

This will happen with a few other items that the characters happen upon.  Judging by how pleased Matt was with Cracklemaw –which by the way, has been used more creatively than I thought was possible with the weapon — this organic handling of magic items will definitely be a staple of 4e games I run.

Have you done anything like this in your 4e campaign?  What were the results?

D&D Home Page – What Class Are You? – Build A Character – D&D Compendium

Courtesy of Dave of Critical Hits, via Twitter.

I’m always on the lookout for good software, and I love to evangelize on software that other people can use. So, I’ll ask: What software do you use to aid you in the running of your 4th edition D&D games? What software are you curious about that you’d like to see in action?

Here’s the software I’m using at the moment:

• Campaign Cartographer -I love making overland maps with this tool.
• Dundjinni -as previously noted, just picked this up and I love it for battlemaps in my on-line game.
• The Journal -I keep my campaign notes in here. Very easy to organize multiple campaigns and do some freewriting/brainstorming in.
• Evernote -a great tool for collecting info on the web and doing what I call ‘imagestorming’.
• Irfanview -a fast quick image editing tool that I use for resizing and cropping. Also make use of the command line interface for batch processing.
• Fantasy Grounds -did I mention that this program is awesome? Talking about this more than that will require a full post of its own. It was well worth the money I paid for it.
• Skype -the second half of my online combo, I needed to get my router upgraded to an Airport Extreme which I have become enamored of and did some portmapping and other tweaks, but now Skype runs like a dream.
• D&D Insider Compendium -I’m using this instead of my books more and more when building encounters and adventures. It’s just so much easier and so much faster, and I get to cut and paste what I find into my documents.
• Itunes -when building adventures, one needs the proper tunage.
• D&D Insider Character Builder -you know that I love this thing. I think it’s the best character generation program I’ve ever used. It’s definitely the best D&D has had. I use this to make PCs when I should be writing adventures.
• Crawl Notes -My new tool for mocking up dungeons. I can draw up everything here before I get to creating the battlemaps out of tiles and such.

What I’m still looking for:

• An Initiative Tracker -I’m stilling looking for an initiative tracker to call my own. I’ve played around with some, but still haven’t found the one I really want to use. Fantasy Grounds has a great combat tracker, but I’m not going to open that up for my tabletop games.
• Fonts and a Font organization program -I need this to help make some props, but it’s touchy. I don’t want to spend a million dollars for fonts or the font tracker program. Anyone know good and cheap solutions?

What are you using?  What are you curious about? What can you recommend?

Format of the new power courtesy of 4e Power Creator.

Video review coming later in the week.

No more. Behold the glorious power of the young cake dragon (cake dragons don’t ever live to ancient, and you wouldn’t want them to).

Initiative +4 Senses Perception +5 Tasty Aura Aura 2; all enemies within 2 are marked. HP 172; Bloodied 86 AC 17; Fortitude 20, Reflex 17, Will 20 Speed 6

Cake Claws (standard; at-will) * tasty, psychic

Reach 2; +8 vs AC; 2d8 + 4 psychic damage The dragon swipes a tasty claw at the adventurer. The opponent is dazed (save ends)

Cake or Death (standard; recharge 5 6) * tasty, cake, necrotic

Close blast 3; +4 vs Will; 3d8 + 4 damage The cake dragon unleashing a vicious blast of cake…and death.

Have your cake… (standard; recharge 5 6) * cake, tasty, arcane

Area blast 2 within 10; +4 vs Fortitude; 3d8 + 4 damage The dragon unleashed a delicious burst of goo at the players. The target is slowed and can only make move actions that move it closer to the cake dragon (save ends both)

Alignment: Unaligned Str 20 (+7) Dex 15 (+4) Wis 12 (+3) Con 12 (+3) Int 12 (+3) Cha 20 (+7)

And since I’m whining…what else do I want to see remade for 4e? I just got done reading the Power of Now, so I’m going to apply it here, to make sure it all happens as soon as I wish.

• Dark Sun.  I don’t know if I even need to say this one, but here it is.  I mean, they even re-released the Amber Enchantress.  I want it nooooooow.
• Mystara.  The D&D Rules Cyclopedia kicks tail.  The Mystara setting, with its set of Gazetteers, also kicked tail.  Nothing fancy, just good old fantasy. Noooooow, WotC.
• Hollow World.  Technically, this was just the guts of Mystara. but man, we had so many great adventures in this land whose sun was the core of another world.  Re-release this now.  Thank you.
• Kara-Tur. Like a crane kick from out of the blue, comes a random pick that was one of my favorite settings ever.  Technically, just part of the realms, but really?  It’s own little slice of heaven, a great oriental setting before Rokugan was even a twinkle in AEG’s eye.  You know the drill by now WotC. Re-vamp and re-release at your earliest convenience, which should be, you know…now.