Aspects: This is the big one, the obvious one. In Spirit, each character starts with ten aspects; these are words or short phrases that collectively give an overall impression of who the character is. They may be physical characteristics, personality traits, notable quotes, goals, important NPCs, or other, similar things. In addition, players get fate points that they can use to invoke their aspects. Whenever a player makes a roll, he or she can spend a fate point and invoke a relevant aspect in order to get a bonus to the roll after the fact, or re-roll the roll altogether (though the second roll sticks, unless another aspect is invoked and another fate point is spent). You can also tag other peoples’ aspects, which is functionally the same as invoking an aspect except that you’re doing it to someone else’s aspect for your benefit. Finally, the GM can compel an aspect, offering the player a fate point in return for the player acting in accordance with the aspect in question; this typically restricts behavior in some way, and often complicates things for the players.
In D&D: I plan on starting each PC with one aspect from the outset, as well as two aspects that they can choose at a later time, whenever it seems dramatically appropriate. When a player invokes or tags an aspect, it can grant one of three effects. First, it can allow the player to reroll the d20 roll, taking the second result. Second, it can grant a +5 bonus to the roll, after the roll is made but before success or failure is determined. Third, and this is really a very D&D combat-specific use of an aspect, if an d20 roll comes up 18 or higher on the die, an aspect can be invoked to treat it as a natural 20. Compels work in much the same way as described above; there’s really no need to convert.

Declarations: Spirit has a number of skills that can be used for gaining information, such as Academics, Mysteries, Art, or even Burglary. Gaining information is one thing, but players can actually make skill rolls in order to declare facts about a situation. For example, let’s say the players walk into an ancient temple full of traps. A player could say, “According to my extensive knowledge of the history of this temple, I know for a fact that there are numerous secret passages that we can use to our advantage.” The GM then calls for a roll, maybe Academics, and if it’s high enough, the statement is true. In Spirit, this usually means placing an aspect on the scene, one that can be tagged later for the players’ benefit.
In D&D: The knowledge skills (Arcana, Dungeoneering, History, Nature, and Religion) can all be used to make declarations as above. I’d also allow skills like Insight, Perception, or Streetwise to be used to make declarations given sufficient justification or under the right circumstances. Declaration can cause a narrative effect, can place an aspect on the scene or on a person that can be tagged, just like in Spirit, or might create a terrain feature or power that can be used during an encounter. Now, to limit how often this happens, I’d probably cap declaration usage at once per scene per player, a scene being roughly equivalent to an encounter.

The first encounter of the session was just a fairly straightforward fight against some gnolls. It was fun, but nothing too out of the ordinary. The second encounter was where things got interesting. I’ll set it up for you.

The players were tasked by some druids to go and investigate a clearing that was imbued with an otherworldly presence. They got to the clearing, which contained a circle of standing stones, and saw that there was a large glyph on the ground in the center of the stone circle. Shortly afterward, some floating balls of light descended and attacked.

Ok, so the glyph was a prophecy mark, an idea that I lifted from Eberron. The balls of light were custom creatures called ‘prophecy motes’, and they didn’t so much attack as try to make you understand the prophecy, forcibly. The motes, themselves, were minions, and they had a ranged attack that did some psychic damage and dazed the target. The trick was that, if you killed a prophecy mote, two more appeared on their next turn. I had set this combat up so that a straightforward fight would not win the day; there was simply no way to beat it through strength of arms alone. In a way, the encounter was kind of a puzzle, and the players figured this out very quickly.

As soon as they saw additional prophecy motes appear, they decided to investigate the prophecy mark. I hadn’t anticipated how closely they would investigate it (they tried to read it), but I had enough prepared that I was able to easily improvise. And this really highlights one of the most useful rules of DMing that I’ve learned: whenever possible, say ‘yes’.

‘Can I read the prophecy mark?’ Sure. Here’s what you manage to decipher. And that allowed me to drop clues as to the nature of the mark. The players soon figured out that they were supposed to enter the mark, which they did, thus succeeding the encounter. It was a lot of fun.

The third and final encounter was actually two planned encounters that wound up happening concurrently because of the way the players planned out their ambush. They were trying to catch an assassin in the act of killing the Lord Warden of Fallcrest, and they all hid around the manor and laid in wait. It was a tough encounter–three elites and a solo, all of them higher level than the PCs–but I never really intended for it to continue until one side was dead. In this encounter, both sides had very specific goals. The PCs wanted to catch the assassin and save the Lord Warden, while the bad guys wanted to assassinate their target and escape. It became a very tense affair, with the fighter holding off the three elites downstairs (fade assassins, custom creatures modeled after the myrdraal of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series) and everyone else focusing on the assassin and his target.

In the end, the assassin succeeded and escaped, and this highlights something else: recurring villains. I love recurring villains, mainly because I feel that players will get attached to their dislike of those villains. You don’t want every villain to be a recurring villain; that makes the players feel like they can’t seem to stop anyone for good. But if you do want a recurring villain, you can do a lot worse than use a solo and have him escape when he’s bloodied. If you’re going to do that, make sure he’s got an escape contingency. My assassin (Judgement, a warforged former avenger of the Raven Queen) had a long-range teleport ability that would take him 20 squares, provided he ended in an area of darkness or dim light. Because it was dark outside, he was able to teleport out the window and escape precisely when I needed him to. The reaction I got from my players was priceless; I can tell they really have a vested interest in stopping Judgement now, or at least confronting him again.

Yes, I now have a tattoo. Yes, it’s a very geeky one.

So that I might end on a high note, I’ll cover the bad stuff first. The single biggest gripe I have with the game is probably one you’ve heard before, if you’ve read anything resembling a review for this game before now: the controls. Everything except for the camera and the ability to rotate objects is controlled using the stylus, and while this works well enough for positioning and manipulating objects, Maxwell (your character) is just as dumb as dirt. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve tried to move a particularly fiddly object, only to see Maxwell jump merrily to his death in a pit of lava or shark-infested waters. Even when I’m trying to control Maxwell, he often fouls things up through no apparent doing of mine. Controlling Maxwell is a very approximate and imprecise, and often you’ll want him to, say, dig through ice with a pick-axe, and he’ll instead jump in place like a spastic mental patient. Which sort of brings me to the next flaw.

Everything is controlled by a physics system; the problem is, the system doesn’t model relative weight all that well, if at all. Why is it that I can set a car down next to a ledge, but as soon as I attach a rope to it, it gets pulled right off the cliff? Why can’t my helicopter lift a penguin? Similarly inscrutable, at least occasionally, is the game’s internal logic. Why, when I try to break a starite out of a block of ice with a sledge hammer, do I break the starite, too, but when I shoot the same block with a machine gun, the starite survives? Why will my vampire attack just about everyone except for a pesky pair of redcaps?

The camera, too, needs some work. Controlling the camera is mapped to the d-pad, and works just fine; the problem is that it snaps back to Maxwell after about a second and a half of inactivity, which is simply inconvenient in a game in which you’ll often want to be creating things and placing them in areas where Maxwell isn’t (presumably so he doesn’t accidentally jump off a cliff or something).

All that said, I find I simply can’t stop playing the game. I frequently curse it, and it frequently frustrates me, but I can’t stop playing it. It’s simply too original a concept, and the basic concept is simply too well-realized, for me to pass up. And for that reason, if you’ve been at least a little bit interested in this game, or if you like puzzle games, you should go out and buy it. And if my earlier negativity has dissuaded you, you should still buy it. Why? Because every copy that gets bought makes it more likely that a sequel will be released, a sequel with better controls, better physics, a better camera, and better internal logic. And because it’s crazy fun, when it works right.

The recent session got me thinking about some stuff. One fight in particular, the one where the PCs were attacked by undead creatures, gave me some insight as far as what is and isn’t fun for solo monsters. I used a solo monster in that fight, a zombie abomination from an RPGA adventure (I got it from the Compendium). I used the monster as written, and I ran into some issues. First, it’s probably important to use a solo that is the same level as the party. This solo was a level behind, and its attack bonuses just weren’t up to par. Actually, I’m not sure why its attack bonuses were so low. It had trouble landing any hits on the part, and at one point it was marked by Chance, but in order to hit him it literally had to roll a natural 20. The abomination wound up being a big sack of hit points, but not really much of a credible threat.

Another issue with the abomination is its Rise Again power; basically, when the abomination is killed, it gets back up on the following round with half its max hit points. It’s not the first time I’ve seen this power; the zombie hulk from the monster manual has the same power. In the case of the zombie hulk, I think it’s okay. The hulk is a standard monster, with 88 hit points, meaning it’ll rise again with 44; a group with two strikers (like mine) should be able to take that out in a round or two, so you get some dramatic tension when it gets back up, but it doesn’t drag the combat out too much. With the abomination, though, has 232 hit points, so it gets back up with 116; that’s a lot of extra hit points. What I found is that the power made the combat drag on a little too long, after the party’s victory was already a foregone conclusion. In general, I think it’s a bad idea to give solos, and maybe even elites, abilities that make them harder to hit or give them too many hit points. You want them to last for a while, but you don’t want them to overstay their welcome or make the combat drag. Solos should also have pretty good attack bonuses, so that they actually feel like a big threat. As it was, I think the forsaken shell did more damage than the zombie abomination did.

I’ve also been reading the new Eberron Campaign Guide, and I’m definitely going to be stealing some ideas from it for my campaign. You may already have seen some of that in the newest session report, in my mention of a druidic sect known as the Wardens of the Wood. In that case, it’s basically just a name I liked, but there are other, more significant things that I’ll be borrowing and adapting for the campaign. Just wait and see.

The single greatest modification that I made to the published adventure was in the final battle of the adventure, against Kalarel. In the published adventure, Kalarel is accompanied by some skeletons and a wight, and there’s a trap in the form of the Thing in the Portal, which grabs and draws nearer adventurers who draw too near in the first place. When I first read the adventure, I thought it was a cool encounter, but that was before I had experienced more of the breadth of what 4th Edition had to offer. I do think that, for those who are still undecided about the new edition, taking D&D for a test drive with the adventure as written is perfectly viable, and probably lots of fun. But I wanted to do something different.

So, I completely rejiggered the final encounter. For starters, I created the corpse mound that I talked about before. Then I added a couple of hazards; one represented the darkness emanating from the portal, the other the subtle and seductive call of said darkness. Then I reduced Kalarel’s level a bit and modified some of his abilities so that the encounter’s level was a little more in-line with my party’s level.

It’s a level 7 encounter, all said, but with a lot of potential to be very, very difficult. There are some nasty threats in there, and all of them had at least a couple of levels on the party. So I staggered things a little bit. Initially, Kalarel is involved in completing the ritual, so the party only has to contend with the corpse mound. After a couple of rounds, Kalarel completes the ritual, joining the fray. The following round, the two hazards activate, and every round thereafter the darkness expands, filling more of the room.

Now, I had a way for the PCs to reverse the effects of the ritual built into the encounter, but I’m a firm believer that a big failure should not be a show-stopper, but should rather make things more interesting. Thus, I created a skill challenge that would trigger if the darkness expanded too much. This had the effect of also putting a time limit on the encounter, which prevented it from turning into too much of a slog.

At any rate, here is my writeup of the encounter. The experience per party member assumes a party of 5 characters, and there’s no treasure included in that writeup (I had that in a separate document for some reason). The encounter does use the standard battle map that the original encounter used; Kalarel starts in front of the altar, while the corpse mound appears as a mere pile of corpses in the pool of blood in the center of the room. The darkness, as you’d expect, emanates from the portal once Kalarel has completed the ritual. Enjoy.

The other game we played did not leave quite so good an impression on me. We played Catan: Cities and Knights; it’s probably the third time I’ve played a Catan game, and it really drove home for me some problems that I had with the game initially. I’m going to say something that might be a little controversial: I think that Catan is a poorly designed game. That might be a little strong; I think there are some poor design choices within the game that can cause the game to be completely un-fun for one or more players.

There are a couple of factors that contribute to this opinion. First is that the game is decidedly not beginner-friendly. As I’ve said, I’ve only played Catan games about three times now, and that’s over the course of two or three years, so I’d still consider myself a beginner. Every time I’ve played the game, I’ve felt like I didn’t know what I was doing initially, and that I was at an enormous disadvantage because of it. The strategies in Catan are not always immediately apparent to a beginner, and this can make for a bad first impression of the game. The first two times I played, I had enough fun that I was willing to play again.

Sadly, I don’t think it gets another chance from me, and this is largely due to the high degree of luck within the game. Now, I don’t necessarily have a problem with luck-driven games. Fluxx is highly luck-driven, but it’s short and you always have decisions to make and things to do, regardless of the cards you get. Last Night on Earth is considerably longer and also has a high degree of luck. In this case, however, I think that the randomness supports the theme well, and bad luck still never robs you of your ability to make decisions. And that’s really the crux of the matter here. A game is only fun when you can affect the outcome of the game. As soon as you feel like nothing you do matters, it stops being fun. And that’s exactly what happened last night.

As I’ve said, I consider myself a beginner when it comes to Catan games, and this means I don’t always know the optimal strategies or the optimal places to put my starting settlements. I placed my settlements last night in spots that I thought were advantageous; I had access to a port that allowed me a 2:1 trade on wheat, and in theory I had access to a lot of wheat. In theory. The problem was, because of the luck of the dice, I almost never got resources. There were entire half-hour stretches of time where I was the only one not getting any resources at all. In Catan, resources are everything. Without resources, you can’t really take any actions, and you can’t really make any decisions. Because of this, I spend most of the game reading the Adventurer’s Vault. I felt completely impotent throughout the entire game, starting around turn 2, and there was really no mechanic to allow me to affect the outcome of the game without resources. Because your access to resources is based largely on your initial placement and (mostly) on the luck of the dice, I literally had absolutely no control over what happened in the game once the initial placement was over. This made for a two-hour game (we ended prematurely; the game could have gone on for another hour at least) that was not the least bit fun for me, and it strikes me as exceedingly poor game design.

I think that, if you’re going to design a game to rely a lot on luck, you need to put mechanics in the game that allow players to continue to make decisions regardless of how luck treats them. I’m not saying that someone who’s extremely unlucky in the game should have the same chance to win as someone who’s extremely lucky; I just think that they should be able to do something meaningful with their turns. On most of my turns, I rolled the dice, saw that I couldn’t do anything, and passed the dice to the next player. Fun, huh? I don’t think I’ll ever play a Catan game again.

Each character has a personal quest, some sort of long-term goal that he/she can work toward over the course of the campaign. It doesn’t have to take the whole campaign, but it should be long-term enough that it should last at least until the next tier of play. Now, these personal quests to not grant experience points directly; they may inform adventures that I come up with and reward the whole party XP in an indirect way, but they do not grant XP to a single character, leaving the other characters behind. Instead, any time you accomplish some significant goal that gets you closer to your ultimate goal, you get one or more story points.

Story points can be used to do a variety of things, both story-related and mechanical, and their capabilities and limitations are largely up to a specific gaming group. I’d like to give my PCs a lot of narrative control without having to use story points, so they’ll be affecting the story in a lot of ways without having to spend these. However, they might be able to use story points to:

• Change an NPC’s disposition toward them. The PC would have to come up with an explanation for this; maybe the NPC is secretly attracted to a PC, or maybe they knew each other a while back and the NPC just remembered this.
• Dictate some loot that will make it into the adventure in the near future, probably in the next session. If there’s a particular magic item that a PC reall, really wants, this is a surefire way to get it soon. It does, however, have to be level-appropriate. I’d also probably say that, if the PC is willing to spend a lot of story points on it, it doesn’t have to be deducted from the party’s treasure parcels for the current level, but it can be if the PC doesn’t want to spend a lot of story points.
• Automatically succeed on a single skill check. Great for skill challenges, not being surprised, etc. This, again, will require narration and explanation.
• Turn a regular hit into a critical hit. This use of a story point would likely be limited to once per encounter, or perhaps every time you use it in the same encounter, it doubles in cost. This would be a nice way to get some mileage out of feats that only trigger on a crit; my PCs tend to avoid those, because you might never get a chance to use them.

Those are just some examples. Another thing about story points is that I’d like to encourage players not to hoard them by giving them an expiration date, similar to action points. My idea is that they can carry a limited number of story points over into the next adventure: 1 at heroic tier, 2 at paragon, and 3 at epic. Any story points above that are lost.

Now, I’m really curious about what other people think of this mechanic, so feedback is welcomed.

A while ago, I was allowing my players to come up with personal quests, little things that they thought were cool and wanted to be part of the story. I awarded them XP for these quests, but quickly learned that that was not an ideal solution, because it created a disparity between the party members’ XP totals, and made leveling more complicated than I wanted it to be. So, why not award them with something else? Story points!

The idea is that story points are like action points in that they are a reward mechanism that is designed to be spent. Instead of providing combat benefits, however, story points would allow players to influence the course of the adventure in small ways. They’d last perhaps until the end of the adventure, or perhaps there would be a limit to how many you can have at one time, in order to prevent hoarding of story points. I’ll need to figure out exactly how they work, but I like the idea. More on it later.

Hitman: Blood Money: This is actually the first Hitman game that I’ve actually completed, and I liked it quite a lot. Some of the missions were very difficult for me to complete gracefully, but you can jump into any mission you want to at any time once you’ve beaten it, so I may go back and remedy that at some point. Like its predecessors, it’s less an action game and more a game of patience and problem-solving. You have a target (or, in many cases, multiple targets) that you have to eliminate. You’re rewarded for not killing other people, for not being seen killing people, for not blowing your cover, and for not leaving any trace that you were there (including bullets in your targets’ heads). The best kills look like accidents, and it’s entirely possible in most (if not all) missions to go in with no guns and complete the mission. Again, I liked it a lot.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time: I may wind up giving this one back. I liked it at first; I’ve always been a fan of these action/puzzle-solving games, and I like spatial puzzles like those presented in the game, and in the most recent Tomb Raider games. I must say, though, that this game is frustrating despite its time-rewinding feature, largely because I feel like I’m fighting the controls and the camera every step of the way. The camera is obstinate and uncooperative, frequently becoming lodged in places that give me no useful vantage point. The controls are floaty and imprecise, making it difficult to accomplish the precision that the puzzles require of you. All of this may have been better on the Xbox, its original system; I’m playing it on PC, and I’m not having much fun.

Gun: Guess what? I’ve decided I like western games. At least, I like this one. I’m having a lot of fun shooting bandits, riding around on horseback, and layin’ down the law, Eastwood style. It’s great fun.

The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition: since you can swap between the original graphics and the new graphics on the fly, I can tell you that the new graphics are a huge improvement, though the animation looks strange at times. The voice work is good for the most part, though the game has its fair share of delays between lines. The hint system is great, and it saved me from frustration many times, particularly toward the end where there’s a lot of pointless and annoying backtracking over fast stretches of Monkey Island. Worth the $10; not sure I would have felt okay about it if I’d paid more.

Plants vs. Zombies: Yeah. The title says it all, really. This is a fantastically fun and addictive little game. It gets difficult (especially in the unlockable mini-games), but it ramps up pretty gradually, allowing you to get a handle on what all of your plants can do, and on what all of the zombies can do. Definitely worth the money.

The Sims 3: As many have said, it’s The Sims, with a “3″ after it. Is it more of the same? Yes. Is that a bad thing? Absolutely not. It is more of the same, but they’ve managed to update enough so that it remains fresh and fun. If you like Sims games, you’ll probably like this one; if you don’t, I doubt this one will change your mind. If you’ve been curious about this crazy Sims thing that everyone’s been talking about since you got out from under that rock, this one’s a good entry point into the series.

Batman: Arkham Asylum: I just got done playing the demo, twice. I like the game. The brawling is pretty simplistic, but is very cinematic and makes you fell like a badass. The stealth portions are good and, again, make you feel like a badass. In short, this game makes you feel like Batman, a badass. I liked the demo. I’d like to play the full game when it comes out. Do I want to spend $50 on it? Well, that’s a bit thornier. $50 seems steep for this game; I’d pay $20 or even $30. Maybe I’ll wait for it to come down in price a bit. Or try to get it on Goozex.

I must say, I like the psion’s powers a lot. The power point mechanic works pretty well, and with three at-wills that can each be augmented into three different versions, plus some dailies and utilities, I only felt like I had run out of interesting things to do once, during the second encounter. The second encounter was pretty sloggy, against a tough solo that seemed to have never-ending hit points and high defenses; we were whiffing quite a lot.

The first encounter, though, was very satisfying. I got a chance to inflict someone with lots of psychic vulnerability, then whack them with psychic damage and a big attack penalty. I also got to command someone to jump off of his rooftop perch and attack his ally, which is always fun. Unfortunately, I only got to use that particular at-will twice in the game, since it requires some setup and isn’t much use against solos with no minions.

All said, it was a really fun way to spend the day, and I got to donate some canned food to charity, too. Not bad.

Shadow Ghoul
This is really just a modification to the base ghoul in the Monster Manual; I wanted a lurker rather than a soldier, so I gave it a couple of extra abilities: death from above and fade to shadow. To complete the concept, I gave it the shadow origin, and you can play it up even more by describing how the shadows seem to cling to it, and how a cold numbness creeps into the PCs’ veins when it strikes. At any rate, this beastie works really well for harassing defenders and getting to back-rank strikers. The fact that it can leap 8 squares and knock someone prone and grab them means that it effectively monopolizes one PC’s attention for a round or two (assuming it hits), and once they shake it off, it can teleport away and do it again. Make sure you use it in a place with lots of shadows and darkness to make best use of its abilities.

Corpse Mound
This guy is a pretty effective soldier. The final battle in Keep on the Shadowfell, for my group, consisted of Kalarel, the main bad guy, and this thing, as well as some traps that manifested later on. The corpse mound (and the ravenous corpses it spawned) did an admirable job of keeping the heat off of Kalarel so that he could focus on completing his dark ritual. Basically, you’ll want to keep it close to as many PCs as possible so that it can get free attacks from its aura, and use corpse missile and corpse burst whenever you get the chance. As with the shadow ghoul above, we see that the combination of being knocked prone and grabbed is extremely effective at getting a PC’s undivided attention.

You can see pictures from last night’s game, if you want to. Toward the end, you’ll see two things that I picked up recently. One is a very nice storage solution for my Dungeon Tiles and minis: a 9-drawer rolling storage unit that I picked up from JoAnn Fabrics. Also, at a back-to-school sale at Target, I picked up a magnetic whiteboard and some magnetic index cards for it, all of it dry-erasable. The nice thing about these items is that they’re perfect for tracking initiative and conditions. One card per combatant or group of combatants, and plenty of space to write things like ‘weakened’ or ‘dazed’. I just need to find a good way to prop it up for all to see; it was a little unstable last night.

I also ran a skill challenge last night that I’ve been looking forward to for a while. The skill challenge represented the PCs trying to navigate their way through the darkness after the ritual came to fruition. The PCs failed the skill challenge during the first round of checks, but everyone was into the mystique of what was going on, so I extended it a little, calling for a few more checks and such, and adding in more description and requiring more description for how they were to escape. It went really well, I thought.

I feel a fair amount of pressure regarding this. Think about it: if the game goes really well, three new people might join the hobby of role-playing. If it doesn’t, they’ll probably never look at an RPG again. It’s kind of a big responsibility. The good news is, I feel like 4E has taken a lot of the pressure off with some of the things they’ve made available lately.

1. Dungeon Delve. I love this book. I plan on running them through the first-level delve, with some modification, using three 2nd-level pregens. It’s a simple enough thing to modify the delve for a smaller, but somewhat more powerful, group of PCs. A kobold gone here, a kobold gone there, and you’re pretty good. I did want to give them a memorable and iconic D&D experience at the end, though, so I made some modifications with . . .

2. The Monster Builder. What a fantastic tool. I wanted the PCs to fight a real, honest-to-goodness dragon, not just a wyrmling. So I took a few of the kobolds out of the fight, and replaced the white wyrmling with a young green dragon, reduced to level 2. I chose a green dragon because I have a mini for it, and because I really like the 4E green dragon that drips poison from every orifice. Reducing its level was extremely easy with the Monster Builder; a few clicks, and I’ve got a nice printed-out stat block for the game.

3. The Character Builder. I used this tool, which I also love, to create interesting characters for them to play. I got some input from them about what they wanted to play, and wound up making a gnome warlord, a goliath barbarian, and a genasi swordmage. I chose powers with the delve in mind, so that every power would be useful. I chose feats with simplicity in mind, trying to choose only feats that added passive benefits or (in the case of the gnome) multiclass feats that just added new powers altogether (the gnome is multiclassed into fey pact warlock), so they wouldn’t have to worry about what feats did.

Within 30 minutes, I had three characters printed out, complete with power cards, a few post-it notes in the delve to let me know what to take out of each fight, and a printed out boss monster of the appropriate level for them to fight. It was the easiest prep I’d ever done. Now I just need to get the guys together so we can use it.

All that aside, though, this is a great tool that is under active development, and the creator is receptive to feedback. I hope that the Adventure Tools that Wizards is making will be something like this, because I’m imagining something with the functionality of Masterplan, but tied to the Rules Compendium and to the Monster Builder, and it makes me very happy.