Month in Review: April 2009

April was our best month yet. If you missed any of the great material we posted, here’s your chance to get caught up. We’ve only been around for three months, but in that time we’ve covered a lot of ground. Our readership has continued to grow and again we thank the loyal readers who visit us every day and comment regularly. Here are the highlights just in case you missed anything.

Highlights

Module

The Guardians is the third original module created by the Dungeon’s Master team. It picks up right where our other modules, The Magistrate’s Daughter and The Spy In Our Midst, left off.

Skill Aides and Skill Challenges

We covered three more skills in our ongoing Skill Focus series. Skill Focus: Heal and Skill Focus: Bluff each provide 10 new and creative ways to use these skills. In Skill Focus: Intimidate we looked at drastically different outcomes based on how you use this skill. We also looked at using different skills to assist in
Skill Focus: Assisting (Part 2).

We published two new skill challenges in April.

• Kidnap and Ransom (Part 1) – The PCs have limited time to find a missing boy and they can adjust DCs depending on what they consider to be acceptable risk.
• Kidnap and Ransom (Part 2) – The PCs face a mixture of skill checks and combat as they attempt to rescue the missing boy.

The Skill Challenges tab at the top of the page provides easy access to all of our skill aides and skill challenges.

Reputation

This three part series provided us with our first opportunity to author a guest post on another D&D blog. Reputation (part 1) which appeared on The Core Mechanic offered advice for the DM on how to incorporate reputation into his game. Returning back to Dungeon’s Master, Reputation (part 2) explored the positive aspects of player reputation and Reputation (part 3) explored the negative aspects of or player reputation.

Humour

We looked into Cheating in Dungeons & Dragons and we created Funny Feats as our contribution to April’s RPG Blog Carnival: Humor and Gaming hosted by
A Butterfly Dreaming.

Editorial

We took a look inward as the Dungeon’s Master team talked about Why We Do What We Do.

Class Discussion

We showed some love for the Rangers by taking an in-depth look at this class in Rangers: A Breed Apart.

Resources

• A healer spoke up and provided some ground rules for when he would or would not heal the party in I’m Your Cleric, Not Your Bitch!
• We asked for your feedback on New 4e House Rules.
• Our newest member of Dungeon’s Master, Sterling, explained why they’re More Than Just Minions.
• We made the controversial suggestion of Taking the Dungeon Out of Dungeons & Dragons.

Campaign Design

We explored Geography, Politics and Groups of Influence and Fleshing Out Your NPCs as part of this ongoing series. The Campaign Design tab at the top of the page provides easy access to all the articles in this series.

A Look Ahead

In May we’re returning to skill challenges in full force offering more complex and unique templates that you can drop in to any existing campaign. We’ll look at how to maximize your damage output at 1st level in Building a Tank, share our experiences playing Epic level characters, discus the pros and cons of Playing Two Characters, look at the versatility and necessity of knowledge skills, and provide 10 alternative uses for Athletics and Diplomacy. We’re also working on a series of self-contained, single encounter, mini adventures which we plan to debut towards the end of the month. May should be another great month, so be sure to visit Dungeon’s Master every day.

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