4th & Dragon : Dungeons and Dragons...and stuff

Or maybe I have sweaty fingers.

Read it all in one go and see how it fares… If not then, hurrah I effectively had a badly printed copy !

I’m not going to complain much since the store I made the review for (ZeStuff) gave me the copy afterwards. Wee!

Very cool Jim.  Are you planning to review the adventure too?

I read something about the new d20 logo a month or two ago and didn’t like it then.  I was hoping that the ENWorld folks had it wrong (although strongly suspecting otherwise) and I’m disappointed with the final result.  But, whatever.  The GSL is a wholly different beast, so it makes sense to get new labels.

Cool, nice high res pics!  I will have to pick it up and read over it.  It cold very well be the start of my 4e campaign.

My group is so pumped for this.  We are wholly sold on 4th ed.  So I’m having a fire-sale on all my 3.x books.

$30!? Seriously? There is no way this can be worth $30, can there? How long is this adventure? Is it a mini-campaign setting?

My regular group will be waiting to play this until it hits the bargain bin for $5 like all of the v3 and now v3.5 have a year or so after they’re released.

(Also, they’ll be waiting until I finish leading them through Descent: Journeys in the Dark. Which, by the way, is absolutely worth it’s $90 cover price, even though I got it for $30 like-new on Craigslist.)

Mighty Odin’s Cloak… $30 for an adventure?

Totally out of my league. I have other stuff to buy.

For $30 I want the thing to come with the minis for the monsters too.  For what’s included, however, I wouldn’t be willing to spend over $15, and even then I’d need to make sure it was an adventure I was actually going to run before forking over the money.

You can get it for $19 and change on Amazon, and I’m sure a lot of stores will have it discounted for release weekend.  The price is probably high because it includes the extra book with basic 4e rules and DM guidelines.

It would be nice if they published “deluxe” adventures that included miniatures.  I would be much more likely to buy published adventures if I could get a set of unique and useful minis with them that I could keep using after the adventure was done.

The idea of minis coming with the module is something that I was hoping for with 4e. They wouldn’t even need to be unique, just pull them from another, or the newest, set.

I am hoping for a review of this module that lets us know if we should purchase this as something to run after 4e comes out...and not as a jumpstart on the rules, since my group refuses to play 4e until the core books come out.

By comparison, The Red Hand of Doom which takes characters from level 6 to 12 was in full color with 2 double-sided posters size battlemaps and was $25.  Given that is spans a lot more than KotS, I think it was cheap in comparison.

I think I agree with Jim’s assessment.  $20 for what was given in KotS sounds about right.  I didn’t buy it this weekend specifically because I thought it was overpriced at $30.  At $20, I would have picked it up.  That said, giving module specific minis in the package would be awesome.  I’d pay the extra $10 for that.  I’ve seen a thread or two both at Wizards and ENWorld asking for that, but I suspect it’s falling on deaf ears.

Oh, I agree that the battlemaps, full color, and quickstart rules/characters make the product worth a little more (hence why I’d be willing to spend more than $10 on it).  However, of those maps, 4 are reprints from the D&D minis line (no development costs there).  Plus, like Talae, I probably won’t be playing/running a 4e game until after the core books are out, so the quickstart rules/characters are fairly useless to me.

Thus I have to look at what I’m getting that is worth something to me:
a 1st-3rd level adventure (80 pages)
2 new poster size maps.

All told, that isn’t worth $30 to me.  More like $15.  If all six maps were new, I’d probably even be willing to pay $20 for it.

I never cared if a pre-made adventure was in full color or not. I have never used pre-gen PCs. Battlemats? Handy but not a requirement. $30 and no tokens or minis to represent NPCs and monsters in the adventure - which BTW is my main issue as a DM who runs adventures: not having the proper mini or token to represent the monster I am using (just a personal thing, not a game killer).

You give me battlemats (not even originals) but not tokens for the monsters to use on them?

...and the whole minion mechanic is lame…

All for $30.

I’m gonna’ use that $30 to put 2/3 of a tank of gas in my truck and drive to Jims and drink his Coca-Cola instead.

I grabbed my copy Monday evening and I really like it. For the $30 (my comic shop had it on sale so I paid less than $25 after tax) you get more than you might expect (or at least more than I did). First, some of the maps are reprints but I didn’t mind as I wasn’t sure if I already had them. The quick start book is handy (I read through both the player and DM section within an hour), but that didn’t matter as I will not be running it without the release of the core books. It was the adventure that I really liked. I read through every page today and I have to say it looks like its going to be a lot of fun.
I was really expecting just another 1st level cake-walk with Kobolds and Goblins. Well, there are Kobolds and Goblins, but there is so much more. Finally a module with monsters, terrain, traps, interesting NPCs, interesting villains, off-beat locations and most of them actually look challenging. And it is a pretty long module at that. I mean, the characters really will make it to 4th level by the end of it.
Also, nearly every encounter that does not take part on one of the maps can be built using the Dungeon Tiles. I’ve been using them off and on throughout 3e, but this is the first time that I know of where they published a module with the thinking, “Hey, if you bought our tiles you can actually use them here.”
I, for one, am very excited about running this game and although there are no minis (I’ve been wanting that combo set for some time now myself), I see that there is a very cool third-party free product out there that I plan on using.
Say what you want about companies actually trying to stay a float by releasing products so that they can make money (you know, business and all), but I really like this product. Mike Mearls is one of my favorite designers and I think he and the rest of this team are really interested in putting out a fun game. After all, it IS possible to earn a living selling RPG stuff and be proud of the stuff your selling because you know people will enjoy using it.
I’ve been playing and adapting with D&D since red-box days and I do so because I do believe that with each game we all play companies learn what folks like. Sometimes companies do want to put out good products because they do want people to buy them and enjoy them so they will buy more. Every edition brings information that the designers and the gamers learn. It takes time to make things better and, after all, it will never be perfect will it?

Smudging is definitely an issue, Chatty didn’t just have a badly printed copy.  The first day mine was fine, but by the second or third day of frequent reading / handling white fingerprints began to show on the cover as the ink began to wear off.  It’s not terrible, it’s just not something you’re used to in a printed product. 

We just played through the first two encounters (for the second time, different group of players this time) and no new issues came up, and in general the players reacted very favorably.  Overall there’s frustration that the base books are not out NOW so that players can experience more after playing this module.

BTW JIM I love the look of this site.  Very Web 2.0.  I’m adding you guys to my extended blogroll page and am adding you to my RSS feed.

@Bart: Chances are that we got copies from the same print run and the one that hits retail stores is different (though I doubt it).

@all: It kills me that I won’t get to play for another 3 weeks. However, by that time, chances are I’ll have the Core Set in hand also.

When I planned to buy this product, I was expected another tightly bound book that I would have to practically have to break the spine to get to work.  Instead, I got what looked like a rather flimsy product, but it didn’t take me long to like the format.  I can actually lay out the booklet and it stay open!  Not only that, but the adventure is broken up into 2 pages per ‘encounter’ so that you can you leave the booklet open to the current encounter and never flip pages (unless you need to check rules).  After seeing this with excellent layout of encounters, I was hooked.  Fourth edition + easy to use modules = Happy DMs.  Happy DMs make for happy players.

But, yeah, the price is a bit steep.  But, let’s all face it, the price is not dictated by the material or print process—it’s dictated by the fact that it is out BEFORE the books are.

Not much to add that hasn’t already been said, but I love the new format.  Having the encounters on a two-page spread and all the detail you need right there is just fantastic.  I haven’t had a chance to run it yet, but I am really looking forward to giving it a try.

After reading Chatty’s review and some of the comments here, I spent all of last night intentionally trying to smudge my pages a little.  Squeezing them a little tighter than I needed to, rubbing my thumb fairly hard on the same spots for minutes at a time, etc.  So far, not a single smudge to be seen, so I would guess that they just had a bad run of them and some people will end up with smudgy copies while others will be fine.  Perhaps WotC or the retailer would be willing to exchange problematic copies for new ones?

A couple of related items.  WotC has posted an extra skill challenge that can be added to the final encounter and an extra pre-generated PC that can be used.  I believe it is a Tiefling Warlord.

How have people that have run the module already been dealing with cover vs. concealment?  My personal interpretation was that they both give the same penalty to attack rolls, but cover would be like crouching behind a table, whereas concealment would be like hiding in the shadows.  Cover would block line of sight, concealment would not.

Has anyone seen anything that gives more of a clue, or have I overlooked something in KotS that explains it beyond the table of combat modifiers?

Hmm...does not seem to be possible to edit a post.  I meant cover would block line of effect, not necessarily sight, since you can often see that someone is crouching behind a table.

However, I believe in the adventure it also mentions concealment in connection with the monsters not being seen, so perhaps they provide the same penalty to attacks if the attacker knows the creature is there, but cover is simply cover, while concealment means the target cannot be perceived by the attacker?

Maybe they quantified cover with a bonus to defense while concealment is quantified by some sort of chance to miss- representing the attacker’s inability to fully see the target?