Elminster's Law, or, The Law of DMPCs

Jeff Rients may have just given a name to a well-known roleplaying phenomenon. I don't know if he actually invented it or heard it from someone else, but I only care that I can now refer to it by name:

Elminster's Law:
The PCs' desire to kill an NPC is directly proportional to the DM's love of the character.

The Forge of Fury

This is the teaser I wrote for my new game on Rondak's. Hopefully it should be approved and posted in a day or two:

Here's some mood music to set the scene (right-click to open in a new window; make sure to check your volume before you click! EDIT: For some reason, the link includes this website address in front of the actual address, and I can't get it to quit doing that. So you'll just have to edit the address in your own browser, I'm afraid).

Durgeddin the Black, desirous of arms,
Smith of great skill, renown'd among Dwarves,
All spattered and bloody, with hands steep'd in red,
His apron for smithing smear'd with the blood
Of goodwife and mate of hundreds of years
Heldardris Nor Erzak, daughter of Heldal,
Granddaughter of Firumvor Keeper of Steel.
Down at his feet lay bones of his children
Their broken young bodies bone-pale by forge-light -
His beloved kindred, slain by the Blackbloods;
They took from him treasures too dear to be priced.
Now takes he hammer from that ancient anvil
And holds it aloft, the fight to be joined;
He calls on his people to rise up to battle,
Bloodthirsty cries and steel upon steel;
Sparks from the craft of Tharmekhûl’s anvil.
The Dwarves of Durgeddin claim many an Orc
Ere dawn's Sun arising upon that foul day,
But only a handful of clans are left breathing
The winds of the mountain - so few, so few.
He led them, the Hero-Smith, his orphanéd sons
And daughters, descendants of ruin and pain,
To find a new home down deep in the good earth,
A hearth that would warm them and guard them with stone.
Yet grief would not let him find slumber in darkness
And Durgeddin raised up his fists in his rage
And swore on the names of his ancestors long-past
An oath of dire vengeance, of hatred, of wrath.
The blood of his family still staining his beard,
Old Durgeddin promised to raise up a foundry,
A pit where the forge-fires were fueled by his rage,
Where armor was shaped by the beats of his anguish,
Where weapons were cooled in his own boiling blood;
This forge of fury, by powers unholy,
Would he, by his own hands, raise up from the earth,
And hammer out weapons made black by his dark hate
With which to annihilate the psychotic hordes,
The hellspawn that stole all worth from his life!

So is told the saga, as the Dwarves themselves chant it.

Yet who could have known that, after so many centuries, this Forge of Fury would be found?

Now I'm A Tiny Adventurer

I'm going to run a dungeon crawl for Mr. Slusser on Rondak's. We've been playing Tiny Adventures on Facebook a bit lately, and while it doesn't whet my appetite for 4e, it does make me want to play the editions of D&D that I do own. So we discussed it; he wants to play a Paladin, and I want to use my kit-bashed D&D gameworld, Anhur.

As much as I enjoy putting together an adventure on Rondak's, one of the big reasons I secretly look forward to beginning a game there is having an excuse to create a title placard for the game. I mentioned this to Slusser, and he commented that it must be an artist thing. He may be right, but for whatever reason, I love looking for interesting and evocative images on Google Image Search, throwing them into Photoshop to tweak, and then matching them up with just the right font. I couldn't tell you why; I wouldn't describe myself as a graphic designer, per se.

Anyway, here's what I came up with:



This time, I thought a minimalist approach would work.