While the Dungeon’s Master team enjoys some well-deserved vacation time, we’re breaking out the greatest hits and shining a spotlight on a few of our favourite articles from 2009. We’ve searched for hidden gems that our newer readers might have missed and our long-time readers will enjoy reading again. Enjoy a second look at these greatest hits from Dungeon’s Master.
The sixth post at Dungeon’s Master was the Necromancer: Heroic Tier, published way back on February 4, 2009. When you consider that two of the preceding posts were launching soon and our official launch post, the Necromancer series was the fourth content post on the site. As a result the series of articles on the Necromancer have a long history. They have also been one of the most surprising series of posts we’ve written.
The articles were originally written to address the lack of specialist Wizards. The release of 4e and the creation of power sources altered the way several classes worked in previous editions and I felt that the Wizard class was most deeply effected. I always enjoyed the idea of specialists and felt that the Necromancer series was a way to address that. I honestly expected to see more about specialist Wizards in Arcane Power, but that was not to be.
As I mentioned, the Necromancer series has been with us since the beginning and has been one of the biggest surprises about the site. The keyword “Necromancer” is one of the most used terms that drives traffic to our site from search engines. Ameron and I were genuinely surprised when we consistently saw that the Necromancer articles were getting multiple pages views a day, months after being published. This trend has not slowed down. What really surprises us is if you just search necromancer through Google, which is how the majority of people find these articles, I’m not sure if we are ranked in the first ten pages. If you add 4e D&D to the search, we come up a bit higher but those keywords are used less frequently.
As a result of the frequency the original articles were being found through Google we decided to write a follow-up piece on the Necromancer. This article, found below, is our take on the Necromancer from a role playing perspective. Resulting from that article were some comments and criticism on the powers for the original series which prompted a revision. You’ll find the links to the original series and the updated powers contained within the article below.
We hope you enjoy our take on the Necromancer. We’ve been enjoying the traffic it has generated and we plan to do more with the class in the future. We also haven’t forgotten about specialist Wizards, they are still an issue that I think have a lot of potential to explore in 4e D&D to push the power system even further.
Defeating a Lich is not a simple as overcoming it in combat. Liches tie their life force to objects known as phylacteries. The phylactery can range from mundane to mystical. Each Lich has their own preference on what constitutes an acceptable phylactery. What Liches have in common is that their Phylactery is to be well hidden and well protected.