Mad Gaming Madness

The new edition of D&D has inspired a large number of people to "roll their own," and with modern desktop publishing tools being available so cheaply (or even free), it should come as no surprise that a lot of it is really polished. Here are a few sites that I find particularly useful; I can't swear to the balance of all of their materials, but there are some great ideas in there and some very polished game elements I use myself.

I've been a fan of gnolls for years. Most recently, under 4th Edition, Keith Baker wrote an article about playing gnolls ; since I'm a huge fan of his Eberron setting, as you can imagine, I'm very familiar with his work. I made the following conversion of gnolls into a playable race, informed by the Monster Manual , but not slavishly bound to it. It should be pretty well-balanced.

I realize I never posted the follow-up to my earlier post on magic items in Eberron . Well, Real Life bogged me down for a while, but I intended to post a "shopping list" from my group when they made it to Sharn. I'm still working on it. I've converted a bunch of the alchemical items and special substances from 3E and 3.5E, but it's taking a while to do minor magic items. I've stolen a few from this list to pepper my adventures, and I recommend checking it out. Below are the special items.

They snuck it up on me! They've restarted the biweekly Geomorph Contest over at Inkwell Ideas. They lost some momentum, I believe, when they put it on hold for GenCon (and I totally understand why -- they've got a lot on their plate for the Con, and I appreciated them putting it on hiatus over just not saying anything about it and leaving us in the dark). Therefore, they've extended the deadline for the current contest, which has the "building" theme. I had been watching, but when they didn't restart it right after GenCon, I kind of lost track. I'm happy to throw my hat in the ring again, although my stuff pales in comparison to the artists that submit stuff.