Review: Manual of the Planes

Back in my first-edition days, I really loved the Manual of the Planes.  I’m not entirely sure why, because I rarely staged any interplanar adventures at the time.  The odd trip to the Abyss, sure, but nothing I really needed that book for.  And it was a book stuffed full of small print detailing such regions as the Quasi- and Para-Elemental Planes of Dust or Vacuum.  I’m not sure I’ve ever spoken to anyone who used the Plane of Vacuum in a game.  But something about that book fascinated me.

Now the fourth-edition Manual of the Planes is out.  I’d planned to take a wait-and-see approach, but somehow I found myself ordering this one, too.  I’m still not sure how much of it I’ll use — I already had my own take on the 4e cosmology worked out for my game.  Yet I enjoyed reading it.

It’s pretty perverse, I guess.  Anyway, the review.

Manual of the Planes is a 160-page book, like Martial Power.  It feels too short — it could probably have used twice as many pages and hardly touched on everything, though.  With a subject this vast, with this many possibilities, it’s almost bound to feel too short, so I’ll try not to hold that against it too much.  Production values seem pretty good as far as I can tell, and its layout, font, and so forth are still hewing close to that of the core books.  I would like to commend whoever chose its cover, which is clearly a nod to the cover of that first-edition Manual I knew and loved.

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Brainstorming an Adventure

I have more to say about the Renaissance, but I’ve noticed a number of posts on RPG blogs lately about holiday hiatuses or burnout.  Since I had this waiting in the wings anyway, and it’s tangentially related, I figured I might as well put it out there now.

One of the biggest burnout-style problems I face as a gamemaster is writer’s block.  Very rarely do I just get tired of running games, partly because my group switches between systems and campaigns on a reasonably frequent basis.  More often, I’ll find myself planning for the next session and draw a blank.  Then what?

I have a four-element system I use to help me generate new plots when that happens.  It hasn’t failed me yet.  I’m not going to claim all the plots are masterpieces, but they fulfill their purpose:  they capture the players’ attention, progress the game, and let us all have fun.

There’s no particular order to these.  If I get stuck on one of them — I’m not coming up with anything I want to keep — then I skip to another.  If I’m working on one and inspiration strikes, I might forget about the others and follow through.  It’s not the method that’s important; it’s the results.

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Renaissance Mandate

Back to the guns.

When firearms start to become common, they’re going to change the world.  My previous post dealt a little with that — the adjustments knights would make, the probable decline of blast-spell wizardry.  There are larger matters to consider, too, though.

If you were inclined to oversimplify, you might divide people of the early Middle Ages into three groups:  the knights and nobility, who held the power; the peasantry, who had none, and were, under a system of serfdom, little better than property; and the church, the only major social force outside of the nobility.  (There were also artisans, yeomen, and others, but let’s forget about them for a moment.  Of those outside the nobility, only the church was a big enough social force to be considered separately, and we can lump the others in with the peasants.)

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ABD Reaches Milestone, Gains Action Point

We interrupt musings about guns in fantasy roleplaying games for this bit of vanity:  today marks six months since my first post here at A Butterfly Dreaming.

Since June 10, I’ve written 93 posts (94 including this one), averaging around 1,000 words each.  I’ve received 296 comments as of the time I’m writing this, or around 3 per post.  I’ve got 54 different tags and 15 categories.

And a hell of a lot more readers than I ever expected.

I’d like to thank you all for taking an interest and helping kick things off.  Here’s hoping you find the next six months equally intriguing or entertaining or whatever the case may be.  I’ve got some articles planned.

Back to the guns shortly.

Renaissance Unfair

My previous post covered my take on early firearms in fourth-edition Dungeons & Dragons.  Like a lot of other writing I see on the subject, though, it considered the idea mainly from the perspective of a party of characters in a “typical” campaign who acquire firearms from another setting.

In keeping with this month’s RPG Blog Carnival, though, let’s consider another case:  the party of characters in a typical campaign as that campaign’s game-world transitions from the late middle ages to the Renaissance.  In other words, suppose guns have been introduced to the world — and now they’re becoming more widespread.  What happens?

Well, first, a bit of a caveat:  I’m looking at this from the standpoint of a campaign set in a Mythic Western Europe game-world.  There are lots of ways the world could go, but even more so when you start to consider other cultures.  Keeping to the vaguely-Tolkienesque helps maintain a focus here.  I may talk about some of the alternatives in a later post.

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