May was a busy month at Dungeon’s Master. Despite our reduced publishing schedule we still showed great numbers and continue seeing upward trends. Running previews of the new D&D Encounters and Lair Assault certainly helped.

As the Dungeon’s Master home game moved into epic tier, so to does the focus of many of our articles. With the inevitable launch of D&D Next in the not-too-distant-future many of us are trying to get some epic play in before we shift to the new edition. With very few other blogs writing about playing in the epic tier we are becoming the place to visit for high level inspiration. Please let us know if there are any aspects of epic adventuring that you’d like us to focus on.

A lot of the gaming blogs are writing about D&D Next. Although we are participating in the play-testing we have decided to keep our comments and feedback on the new D&D to a minimum for now. We developed our core audience by being the place to go for 4e materials online. We intend to keep that audience happy by focusing on 4e and proving fresh new material for ongoing 4e campaigns. Many of our articles are edition-neutral and can easily be applied to whatever version of D&D you’re playing, including D&D Next, so if you’re fully engrossed in D&D Next we’re confident that you’ll still find many or our articles helpful. However, in the short-term we are staying true to our roots and focusing the majority of our effort on writing about 4e.

We’d like to thank everyone for visiting Dungeon’s Master in May. We saw a lot of new people commenting last month and we hope they continue to share their thoughts and feedback. We value your opinion and want to hear what you have to say. Remember that you can always email us (our email addresses are on the about page) if you have any questions or have an idea for an article.

Highlights

Player Resources

• Intimidate is Not the Torture Skill – Intimidate is a Charisma-based skill and using it is not justification to torture an NPC.
• Playing Drow Part 2 – Know Where You Came From – The physical and cultural influences should be reflected in how you play your character.

DM Resources

• Adventure Hooks: The Legendary Sword Masters (Part 2) – More interesting Masters to interact with your PCs.
• Epic Level Encounter Design – Part 1: Cut the Fat – Bauxtehude does whatever is necessary to make things simple and keep the action moving.
• Epic Level Encounter Design – Part 2: Developing Challenges Appropriate for Epic Level Characters – Bauxtehude encourages you to push the limits of what you can throw at the party.
• When the Plus (+) No Longer Matters – Eventually PCs will realize that the weapons power can be more important than another +1.

D&D Encounters

In May we finished up season 8 of D&D Encounters as The Elder Elemental Eye came to an end. Season 9, Web of the Spider Queen began with plenty of action as the heroes found themselves battling the Drow.

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.

• D&D Encounters: The Elder Elemental Eye (Week 10)
• D&D Encounters: The Elder Elemental Eye (Week 11)
• D&D Encounters: The Elder Elemental Eye – Report Card
• D&D Encounters: Web of the Spider Queen – Preview
• D&D Encounters: Web of the Spider Queen (Week 1)
• D&D Encounters: Web of the Spider Queen (Week 2)

Lair Assault

• Lair Assault: Attack of the Tyrantclaw – Round-up – We share the pros and cons of Lair Assault season 3 as well as share some actual-play podcasts of our experiences.
• It’s Here! – Lair Assault: Spiderkiller – The Drow are everywhere! In this level 9 Lair Assault the PCs have to stop and evil priestess from completing a deadly ritual.

A Look Ahead

In June Bauxtehude will bring us the final installment of his series on Epic play. We also expect that Wimwick will provide an article or two in June now that he’s finished school. With GenCon just around the corner we’ll also start talking more about this year’s con as well as providing some helpful tips about public play and cons in general.

It’s safe to say that we’ll have at least a few articles featuring Drow in June including our tips for playing Drow part 3 as well as new underdark adventuring hooks. Weekly field reports of D&D Encounters: Web of the Spider Queen and an article featuring our initial attempts through Lair Assault: Spiderkiller will (obviously) feature Drow as well. But if Drow aren’t your thing we’ll still have plenty of other material that you should find useful. Be sure to visit Dungeon’s Master every day in June for your daily fix of D&D.

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