Inspired by Dwarf Fortress...

Inspired by Dwarf Fortress, and the fact that some players have actually managed to have they're dwarves colonize Hell itself, I have decided that if my players ever end up visiting Hell (or perhaps one of the other Lower Planes) there will be a dwarven fortress there, managing to survive despite the hostile natives.

A Different Take on Gargoyles

 This post has been sitting in the back burner for a while now, but I think I can just post it in it's current form.

In my campaigns, gargoyles are not evil creatures. They are in fact a form of benign fey with ties to the good gods and celestials, though they're forms are similar to demons and devils. They inhabit places also inhabited by men, protecting them from evil. They may have once been demons that were converted to good somehow, but this theory is unverified.

However, there are creatures similar to the traditional D&D gargoyles. They are constructs, created by demons in mockery of real gargoyles. Perhaps Demogorgon, infamous for his for his use of various constructs such as the Retriever commissioned the first of these, but that is not known for sure.

An article that intrigues me

Article

This article has some bits that intrigue me, in particular this part:

"Second, and most important: Wizards is on the right track.

I’m not a fan of fourth edition. I find the combat slow, the powers limiting, and the rules inhospitable to the kind of creative world-building, story-telling and problem-solving that make D&D great.

But so far, the fifth edition rules show promise. They’re simple without being stupid, and efficient without being shallow. Combat was quick and satisfying; we got through most of an adventure in just a few hours. And I get the sense that fifth edition will bring back some of the good complexity of previous versions, allowing players to create unique characters and new worlds."

From that it sounds like they're on the right track to me.

5e, Hopeful, but not really optimistic

So yeah fifth edition has been announced. I've been reading the Legends and Lore articles on wizards.com and they've given me hope that 5th edition might be better than 4th edition. Yet I can't really say that I am truly optimistic. Will they create a game that can handle my play style? Will it avoid the obsession with balance that IMHO made it difficult to run anything that's non-linear in 4e? Will combats not take hours each to resolve? Will it show more respect for the history of the game?

I don't want an edition where what has come before with regards to "canon" is cast aside. I don't want archons to be elemental warriors, or eladrin to be faerie elves. I want the Great Wheel to be the default cosmology, or at least not all that different from the default cosmology that I have to do a lot of changes to monsters and the like to use the Great Wheel . I want Greyhawk to be the default setting or at least playable with the core materials without lots of houseruling races and the like. Even though I'm not the biggest fan of the Realms I don't want them to have been blown up. Seriously, if you can't play the most generic of settings in a new edition without a lot of work, something has gone wrong.

The focus on making sure everything is balanced makes it difficult to do a non-linear game. Thing is the assumption is that you're players will have exactly x encounters, get x amount of treasure, etc. That doesn't really jive with a game where the assumption is that these things will all be determined by the choices of the players and they're successes and failures. Never mind the idea that failure is often considered to be a thing the DM should avoid.

Well, we'll wait and see. Just might be me and a lot of people will be pleasantly surprised.