As promised, here are the Jumpstart rules for our new game… Enjoy….

Download the whole Zipped Jumpstart Pack!

Or, the individual components:
Jumpstart Rules
Player Character Tokens
Player Character Sheet

Soon will be the time we draw swords together, soon you will see what it means to be HACKTASTIC!

This Month’s Subjects

The New Stuff: Dungeons & Dragons ICONS: The Legend of Drizzt Scenario Pack by WOTC

More New Stuff: Dungeons & Dragons Rules Compendium by WOTC

The Spooky Stuff: Born of Night by Midnight Syndicate

Dungeons & Dragons ICONS: The Legend of Drizzt Scenario Pack by WOTC

Let me just start off by saying, NICE! this is a very nice set from the D&D ICON line. You get a Gargantuan White Dragon Figure (ICINGDEATH), As well as a Wulfgar and a new Drizzt. You also get a double sided battle mat (one side has the dragon’s ice cave the other has an outdoor setting (Evermelt) as well as Scenario rule book that has excerpts from The Crystal Shard and The Orc King. Both Wulfgar and Drizzt come with standard and epic cards. All in all I would say a fitting tribute to everyone’s favorite Drow Ranger. The paint jobs are well done, the figure poses for Icingdeath and Drizzt are awesome. It retails at a hefty $49.99, price, possibly the only short coming of this product. It is about on par with the rest of the ICON series, but that does not help your pocket book much.

The Scorecard

Artwork / Fluff: 4 Nice paint jobs, good poses, nice double sided color battle mat
Usable Game Material: 4 Good as a stand alone mini game, nice figs for RPG. The map could come in quite handy
Overall Content: 4 Nice, A fitting Tribute to Drizzt!
Price: 3 Steep, but worth it if you can afford it
Total “To Hit Roll”: “16” A Nice Solid hit!

Dungeons & Dragons Rules Compendium by WOTC edited by Chris Sims

“ALL THE RULES OF THE GAME IN ONE AWESOME BOOK”, This is what it says on the back of this book, what it should read is “ALL THE SAME RULES YOU ALREADY HAVE IF YOU OWN THE PHB AND DMG, OH YAH WE FINALLY FIXED ALL THE SCREW UPS BY APPLYING THE OFFICIAL ERRATA YOU CAN GET FOR FREE ONLINE”. At a retail price of $26.95 for this 160 page gem you would be better spent buying a n adventure to play at least you would get some use out of it and still have enough for some snacks. The Art work is almost all taken from one of the other books, the layout is crappy and when my group and I tried to use this thing last Monday night for a situation with Death Effects and Several Spell-like abilities we couldn’t find what we needed, but we did find it in the DMG.
I would like to warn everyone away from this book, there is is no real need for it. It just seems like one more way for WOTC and Hasbro to milk some more cash from the 3.5 version of our beloved game. Don’t believe the hype on the back of the book, read a little further down and written in a small box states “For use with these Dungeon & Dragon core books Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, Monster Manual” That should say it all.

The Scorecard
Artwork / Fluff: 0 Same stuff we have seen in other books before.
Usable Game Materia: 1 Some of the rules, but not enough
Overall Content: 0 A big waste of paper, just a rehash and not even a complete one.
Price: 0 Way too high for something you already own
Total “To Hit Roll”: “1” A critical Miss, leave this orc terd on the shelf!
 
Born of Night by Midnight Syndicate

In honor of Halloween I added this 21 Track Audio CD is chucked full of creepy gothic music. As always Midnight Syndicate delivers a quality listening experience that will add a nice dark mood to any RPG session or holiday gathering. With a nice $14.99 price tag you will get some cool creepy tunes and you won’t have to eat frozen burritos and homemade popcorn for a month.

A few of my favorites are Track 8 LURKING FEAR and TRACK 16 DUNGEON, Track 21 FORBIDDEN CRYPTS is pretty cool for an RPG session.

The Scorecard

Artwork / Fluff: 4 Good cover art and a skull on the disk
Usable Game Material: 4 Good dark mood music for a game
Overall Content: 4 A good mix of semi battle tunes and creepy background
Price: 5 A good by in an age of $19.99 CDs
Total “To Hit Roll”: “17” A damn good hit! Pick it up you won’t regret it

Next month we will take on the new D&D miniature set and maybe Issue #2 of Pathfinder. So until then remember, there is nothing that can’t be solved with a flying headbutt!

El Magnifico

Villains, no matter what kind of RPG you play there will always be villains. At mid to high levels making Villains is a lot easier than at low-levels. You don’t have as hard a time coming up with a cool, memorable bad guy to challenge your PCs when you don’t have to worry about killing most of your party with a critical hit from a dagger! Low-level villains need to be more attitude and less flashy powerful magic items and spells.

Villains need to be memorable. The best villains are the ones your players talk about whenever they are not playing. You know you have done your job well when before a play session one of your players say “I hope we don’t run into another bad ass like last time” or if when you put out the same basic creature as your last villain every player groans and starts furiously looking through their spells and gear, just incase one of the foes before them turns out anything like the last villain they ran into.

One of the best way to make a memorable bad guy at Low-Levels is to give him or her a unique look. Nobody remembers the Orc leader with 12hp and a Masterwork Great Axe, but the Orc leader who’s hide armor is made from human faces is another story. None of the PCs think “Oh, he probably only has an AC 14 and 12 hp”, they more likely think “this guy is a real bad ass, to have killed enough people to craft his armor from just their faces”. A cool look makes your player’s imaginations do most of your work for you, plus they will most likely use their best combat tactic, spell or magic item on your villain, saving most of his lesser minions for a much better fight.

Another way to jazz up your villain and not make him too over powering is to give him a template or unique ability. The Half-Fiend Template placed on a low hit dice creature, does make your villain a bit more tough, but does not make him unbeatable, also it gives him a few cool special abilities and a cool look.

If you don’t like the template option you could just give your villain a unique ability, like replacing one of his arms with a tentacle, granting him a longer reach, of maybe a free Trip Attack each round. There are no hard and fast rules to govern this, you’ll just have to use your best judgement. He is a villain, so he does not need to fit into the mold of a common monster of his type. Also this keeps the Players on their toes, because they can’t just know or look up what the villain can do. It is best that when you opt for this method to not let your villain’s special ability to duplicate more than one Feat or Spell-like ability.

Still another option is to give your villain an unique companion, minion or mount. A Kobold Adept is not all that memorable but, the same Kobold Adept who moves around covered in a Spider Swarm or has two small-sized Hunter Spiders that act as guard animals is. If you want to really jazz him up mount him on a Medium-sized Spider, now not only have you made your villain tougher and more memorable, but you have added to the coolness of the encounter. Now your Villain can be hanging from the ceiling on his spider mount or ride his mount up walls.

The last and easiest option I have for you is Potions. The Orc Leader, that chugs down a Potion of Bull’s Strength just became one tough customer for a low-level party to deal with. Even better, the nasty little Kobold keeps drinking Cure-light Wounds Potions just before he should be pushing up daisies is a real pain in the butt. Best of all your Players will start getting real pissed as they see all their treasure dumped down the gullet of the monsters they are trying to slay.

Try a few or all of these tricks and see if your players don’t start hating your villains like they should.

Until Next time
Big-E

Welcome to the new site! It will be growing and undergoing revisions over the next few weeks. Come back often and let us know how we are doing on our new message boards.

As promised last month we will lead the charge into the Roleplay Gaming World. All the rumors and hype are true, as of this month Black Pigeon Press is now a full blow gaming company known as Black Pigeon Press Inc.! We will be using all our gaming knowledge and skills to bring you gaming on a “Hacktastic” level. So what does this all mean? Read on fellow gamers, read on…

1. We will continue with our Gamedays and Mini-Cons the next Mini-Con will be on January 12th-13th 2008. This will known as TPK Con II.  It will be a two day event with three gaming sessions on Saturday the 12th and two gaming sessions on Sunday the 13th. These gaming sessions will have games from all three of our campaigns.  See below for further infomation.

2. Shatterdawn: We will continue as stated with this campaign until it is pulled from our cold, dead hands. We will have two adventures in every game slot at the upcoming Mini-Con TPK Con II.

3. Cosmic Eclipse: We are proud to push the campaign adventures to the outer limits of space. If you are interested in gaming in the far reaches of space then this is the one for you. All rules for this space adventure campaign are based on the D20 Modern game, Future. So hone up on your “Lasertastic” rules and grab your space suit. We will have one adventure in every game slot at the upcoming Mini-Con TPK Con II, including a special intro mod for the adventurous.

P.S. Watch out for Tangler Toads they’re a real bitch…..

4. Gloomforge: As talked about on the previous web pages and rumored in many online message boards this is the one. This game world is all our own. All the stockholders of Black Pigeon Press Inc. have come together with over 100 years of gaming experience and created this gaming system. The “Hacktastic D20, Fantasy” gaming system is a whole new way to play a fantasy rolplaying game. Its all in here: magic, mayhem, legendary fights, helping the helpless, looting the tomb–adventuring on a “Hacktastic” level. So you think you want to be a hero… well we will see about that. This is our game system. This is our world. This is us. Come try it out at the upcoming Mini-Con TPK Con II. We will have one adventure in every game slot, including a special intro mod for the truly “Hacktastic”.

P.S. We will have a free downloadable Jumpstart Quickplay Guide on the site SOON, complete with an intro adventure by BIG E.

See, I told you we were charging in!  What say you join us and make it even more “Hacktastic”? The future, they say, is what you make of it. We chose to make ours and yours unbeleivable. See you soon….

Big E & Giarc