Month in Review: September 2011

September was a great months at Dungeon’s Master. We started the month by hitting the very significant milestone of 1,000,000 Page Views. During September we welcomed two new contributors, we brought you weekly write-ups of D&D Encounters and shared our first attempt at Lair Assault: Forge of the Dawn Titan, and we also shared 100 Beta codes to the new Facebook game Heroes of Neverwinter. The month in review is your chance to get caught up if you missed any of the articles we ran in September.

We want to thank all the readers who visit Dungeon’s Master day after day and month after month. It’s because of your continued support and your comments that our website continues to flourish. As always, we welcome your feedback and comments so keep them coming. You can always email Wimwick or me if you have one-off questions or ideas for articles.

Highlights

Dungeon’s Master News

Our regular readers may have noticed Wimwick’s absence throughout September. He’s returned to school full-time so the number of articles he’ll be able to contribute in the coming months will be substantially less than it’s been in the past. This was a big factor in our decision to put out a call for guest writers in the posting Dungeon’s Master Wants You! Many people expressed interest in writing for us and we were able to feature the work from two of them this month.

The first of our new writers is David Buresh (Sndwurks). Sndwurks and I played together in the D&D Open Championship at GenCon the past two years. When I told him we’d be asking for guest contributors he jumped at the opportunity. He has extensive gaming experience and has a lot of great ideas on how to make your D&D game better. These were his first two articles and we hope to see more from him in the coming months.

D&D Tactica: Enter the Offender – What happens when you combine the best features of the defender and striker roles? You get the offender.
Improve Your Game By Removing Save Ends – Sndwurks suggests taking save ends effect out of the hands of players and either changing the effects to have finite duration or force the PC to sustain with an action.

The second new writer is Kenneth McNay (Dantracker). Dantracker suggested a new regular column in which he analyzed Mike Mearls’ Legend & Lore articles. Of course the very next week Mearls announced he’d be turning the column over to Monte Cook. Dantracker shared his take on the changeover as well as on Monte Cook’s first article for us in September.

In the coming months we’ll be giving a lot of new authors a chance to write for us here at Dungeon’s Master. If you’re interested, please email me. For everyone who has already contacted me, keep those submissions coming.

DM Resources

Even a Regular Item Can Become an Adventure Hook – Need an idea for your next adventure? Look no further than you PCs’ equipment list.
Naked Combat – We look at what happens when the PCs are stripped of all their items, either intentionally or unintentionally.
Say What? – Languages in D&D – Language selection should be an important and significant part of character creation and it’s up to the DM to emphasize this by making the choice matter in-game.
Traps: Challenge the Players and the Characters – When presenting traps, hazards and puzzles to your players it’s important to find the balance between challenging them and their character.
Why Are We Doing This? – As PCs become more powerful they’ll need a strong motivation to continue adventuring beyond acquiring gold and magical items and it’s a challenge many DMs many not be ready for.

Player Resources

8 Things I Learned at D&D Encounters – Whether you play D&D Encounters or not, most of these points are relevant at just about any gaming table.
Confessions of a D&D Camp Councilor: Year II – Best Bits – With another year of D&D Camp finished, Bauxtehude shared the best bits of his 2011 experiences.
Giving Character Backgrounds And Themes Teeth – Wimwick explores ways to keep background and theme benefits relevant to the story, especially as character evolve and grow.
Lair Assault – The New Gold Standard for D&D Adventures – I finally had a chance to play and run Lair Assault. It was fantastic. Here I share my thoughts on the adventure, offer some advice and present an actual play podcast.
The Honor System – Does you PCs have a code or honor? From Wild West gun slingers to Japanese Samari, there are many ways to adhere to an honor code without the need to create a new mechanic for doing so.
What are the Best Feats? The Results Are In! – It took two months but we finally have the results of our poll. Find out what our readers consider to be the best feats in D&D today.

D&D Encounters

As season 6 of D&D Encounters moves forward, we continue providing weekly field reports and audio pod casts. Issues raised in the Week 6 article made considerable waves and the adventure’s author, Erik Scott de Bie, even jumped in and contributed to the discussion in the comments section.

Visit the Dungeon’s Master D&D Encounters Archive for all of our ongoing weekly coverage as well as other great D&D Encounters articles and resources.

A Look Ahead

In October we’ll look how you can find inspiration for battle maps by looking at real locations, we’ll return to our series on exploiting racial and class powers, you can visit us every week for our recount of D&D Encoutenrs: Lost Crown of Neverwinter, and we’ll bring you more reviews and comments about Lair Assault.

As we continue to work with our new contributors we plan to run articles on traps, puzzles and hazards, an article about women in gaming, and a look at some of the most under-appreciated artists in D&D. And of course what’s October without a few articles about undead. It looks like October will be another great month so be sure to visit Dungeon’s Master every day.

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