As Requested, My Curriculum Vitae-

Pictured - Mona and I at our big SCA wedding with the kids, Ash was had turned 12 then and Em had just turned 7 earlier in the month, John was still 9.

My name is William Dowie. I am a 43 year old white man from the rural northern edge of central New York state, on Lake Ontario. I am a giant history nerd, in college I majored in history with a focus on Classical Antiquity and the European Middle Ages, I minored in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. I also took a bunch of Anthropology courses, but not enough to count as a second major. I am 6'6" tall and I have worked as a substitute teacher, short order cook, bouncer, machinist and convenience store clerk, just to name a few. I speak French passably well, Spanish slightly less so, and can usually guess my way through written Italian or Latin. I have tried to teach myself Scots Gaelic, much less successfully, but can pick out a number of written words on sight and sometimes recognize words when I hear them. Oddly enough I can pick out Welsh words now just as easily when they are cognates to the Scots Gaelic words I know, I see patterns in language easily.

I am married to a wonderful woman named Mona and we have three children; Ashli (19), John (17) and Ember (14), who were literally left on our doorstep when they were 11, 9 and 6 respectively. We live on a small, mostly forested plot of land in New Haven, New York - which is north of Syracuse and east of Rochester, nearest to the smaller city of Oswego, NY - where I continue to scheme ways to homestead and get off the grid, mostly because I hate the high cost of electricity in a county with three nuclear power plants, and I want healthier food than I can buy from the store, with the bonus that it'll be cheaper too. I have been frustrated in my attempts to clear my land because it's a lot harder to do than you would think, I have a lot more respect for pioneers now, especially since they did it with no power tools at all. I also have some valuable lumber that I can't seem to get anyone to harvest because my lot is too small and the presence of my house and the power lines along the edge of the road make it too difficult to be worth it, so apparently I need the price of Cherry to rise back to the level it was before our economic collapse to attract loggers.

I have been playing board wargames and D&D since 1980, when my friend Chris introduced me to both the week that we went to see Excalibur together with my dad. We played SPI's Sorcerer that weekend, because he had brought it over to my house and played D&D with him DMing before the week was out using the Holmes Basic rules. I went out and bought a set as soon as I could save up the money, maybe a month later. For a long time after that pretty much all of my money went into my D&D habit in some way or another, books, modules, Dragon Magazine, "official" Grenadier miniatures.

I found the SCA while the local group was doing a demo at the Sterling Renaissance Festival in Sterling, NY back in 1983 when I was 14, I have drifted in and out of the SCA ever since. I am currently missing Pennsic for my 41st time in a row. Something always comes up. Not that it matters anymore, I have passed my fighting prime and I don't think it's coming back no matter how hard I try. I keep resolving to make it to fighter practice more often and get back into my "Crown Tourney" rhythm, but that just isn't going to happen at my age anymore. I don't heal quick enough to fight six days a week anymore. That and I can't afford the gas money for the hundreds of extra miles per week I'd be putting on my minivan to go to all of the extra fighter practices and events. Still, I have made a lot of good friends in the SCA over the years and some great memories, I am happy to have been there for what I did and I wish I could do more still.

1985 was the year of the release of the 1st edition AD&D Oriental Adventures book, it's one of those books that you either love despite it's warts or you hate because of them. I love that book and it's probably because it's the only AD&D book I ever pre-ordered at Twilight Book & Game Emporium in Syracuse, NY - a sadly long gone FLGS. Despite the fact that the glue cracked on the binding causing several pages to become loose literally the first time I opened it, I was determined to get my money's worth out of it. Before my friend Tim left for Basic training in the US army the next year I took over DMing duties from him, which I had only rarely done before, and we played an epic OA campaign. I have played in one pretty epic OA campaign, as a Steppe Barbarian named Chanar Ilkhan, and DMed a few more since. One of my current projects is rewriting the OA book as I think it should have been.

As a side note, I was really anti-Rokugan because they changed the default setting in the 3e version of the Oriental Adventures book to Rokugan from Kara-Tur, and that made me, by default, anti-Legend of the Five Rings. I had been strongly attracted to the setting through AEG's Clan War miniature battle game prior to that, but hadn't bought into it at the time because I could not find at least one other person that was willing to also jump on board with me and had been burned by miniature games that way in the past. Now I am happy to say I have come full circle because I started buying old Clan War miniatures on EBay for my OA campaign and ended up getting the rules, which made me interested in the setting, which made me interested in the RPG, which got me to buy the new board game, which led me to buy some CCG cards too. I have even read through some of the published fiction, and, until it was shut down recently, was playing in a Facebook app version of the RPG called Emerald Empire. I really hated the 3e version of Oriental Adventures.

I played (A)D&D, tried out some other RPGs and wargamed a lot through the 1980s and into the 1990s. Wargaming kind of died in the 1990s (except on the PC, it boomed there), and I concentrated on just RPGs, then just D&D. Sometime after 3rd edition D&D came out, after the novelty wore off for me, I realized I disliked DMing it rather intensely. I was a little late coming to the 3rd edition party, because my D&D group was happy with 2nd edition and we didn't switch over until that campaign died. At the time, I had grown bored with 2nd edition AD&D and welcomed the change, although several things bothered me from the beginning; the faster rate of rising in level was a big one and I missed real multi-classing. I took me a while though, and DMing for several different groups, to realize the worst part was that it neutered the DM. My original AD&D groups, who were familiar with my fast and loose, shoot from the hip DMing style were OK with me making rules calls on the fly when none of us had any idea how something was supposed to work in the new system; we'd keep the game moving and I could look it up later. We might even like my way better. The other groups had people who STUDIED the rules though; at first, every time I made a ruling I'd see disapproving looks, eventually they got brave enough to start offering suggestions as to the right way to handle the situation.

So I quit DMing and let one of them DM in each group. Neither group lasted much longer. One started a new campaign and it was just too railroad-ey, I actually started stress testing that campaign to see what would happen if my character deliberately did things that were contrary to the predestined storyline. My character got punished, he made minor alterations to his storyline, but nothing seriously bad could ever happen to us, so, eventually, as a group we got bored and quit. The other guy just took over my game where I left off and had me make a character that would take his place. He had been unlucky in my game and died several times, but I assume that was because he kept making wuss characters, Rogues and Bards. I made a Barbarian, it was fun while it lasted, we went from 8th to 11th level with him at the helm, then he TPKed the party.

I took a break for a while, despaired over playing D&D again, then picked up Hackmaster. I ran a pretty fun Hackmaster game for a while and that was what led me to realize that I should just go back to playing 1st edition AD&D. That was the year we got the kids though, so I wasn't done with 3rd edition - when they decided they were interested in learning to play D&D, they wanted to play the newest version, 3.5 at the time. I gritted my teeth and went with it, anything to get kids into gaming. I have been walking them back in home games for years now, and have only recently discovered the Moldvay Basic half of B/X myself. Back in the day I bought the Expert Boxed Set when it came out, but I never got the Moldvay Basic Set that matched it because I already had a Basic Set, the Holmes Basic Set. So we've been playing that a bit lately, but my home games are pretty much at a stand-still right now, almost everyone that doesn't live here is too busy to come over and play, and everyone that does live here doesn't want to play with just their mom and dad, brother and/or sister. John is still gaming this summer, he's in a regular 4th edition D&D game with some guys he goes to school with and I am playing Dawn Patrol semi-regularly with Darryl & his dad, John and Dalton. We also recently tried out the Legend of the Five Rings 1st edition RPG here at the house. I am trying to start a game of 43 AD and it's supplement Warband, but the start has been plagued by bad luck and poor coordination of schedules.

I have always run my D&D games in my own "World of Garnia" fantasy setting as a default. It's my Greyhawk, my buddy Darryl and I have been working on this on and off for decades, we're doing a serious reboot of the entire setting and discussing it on my other blog. The primary idea for the campaign is that a group of Celts fled the Roman onslaught to this new world, the world of the Sidhe (Elves) where magic works. The main campaign area is one where their culture has flourished. I designed it originally using the core 1st edition AD&D rules, so there are a lot of 1st edition AD&D assumptions in the setting, but I am trying to make the setting system neutral so that it can be played with any FRPG system. When we have finished the maps and gazetteers they'll be released for use. Currently we're working on the whole world, then we plan to "drill down" and do specific regions. I will also most likely release the adventures that I have written for the setting over the years, it's just finding and transcribing all of the stuff, then updating it to match the current standard is going to be a chore.

By now you are probably wondering where all this "Great Khan" stuff comes from, right? Well back in 1996 my buddy Darryl and I were living most of a continent apart and wanted to play some D&D together. He had played a lot of the SSI Gold Box D&D games starting with "Pool of Radiance" when it came out and we were both new to the internet and on AOL at the time where they had a game called "Neverwinter Nights" that ran using the same engine, but was multi-player, up to 300 I think it was. I guess that makes it the first MMORPG, it was great fun anyway. Darryl was more savvy than me and figured out the best way to advance in the game was through guild membership, so we duly joined a guild together. ERS, the Explorers of the Rising Sun, who made us create new Screen Names, because that was your character's name in the game, and everyone in the guild was named ERS something. I was ERS Garn, Darryl was ERS Frodal, we were named after deities I had created for my Garnia campaign world.

But then we realized, being ambitious adventurers, that ERS was there to help newbies find their bearings and, in general, be nice; and we wanted to move up the food chain in NWN. So we decided to create our own guild, which would, even though it was a gamble, make us guild leaders and let us take charge of our destinies and how we wanted to play the game. We needed a hook though, and that's where our collective history nerdity took over, we decided to play as Mongols, because we wanted to send out a strong challenge to the status quo in all of the guilds and it was unique in NWN to play a culturally oriented guild, unless that culture was a fantasy one. Mostly I think we chose the Mongols though because I was playing them at the time in Civilization. Partly I think we picked them because we both loved the NES game Genghis Khan*, Darryl and I used to spend weekends playing that game together. We also both liked the Mongol reputation for ass-kickery and conquest. Then we studied and studied some more, at this point I think that our kids could hold their own at a conference of Mongol Medieval History scholars.

Anyway, the Steppe Warriors were born. Technically, since NWN is in the Forgotten Realms, we were members of the, at the time, recently defeated Tuigan Horde that decided to march west rather than return east. Darryl was our first Khakhan with his character SW Ogotai, named after one of the sons of Genghis Khan, the reasoning was that he could afford to be online more often (remember this was when you paid/minute of use) because I was in school at the time, and he was a better recruiter. My character was named SW Jagatai, also after a son of Genghis Khan. Ultimately Darryl resigned the position of Khakhan and I was elected to fill it. We've had our highs and lows as a group, and we're pretty dormant now, but I have been Jagatai, Khakhan of the Steppe Warriors since 1997 on the internet, so when I named the blog and when I created my initial Blogger account, I just naturally went with the same motif. My Yahoo email address is still SWJagatai at yahoo dot com, created in the same era. Back when I was sure we were going to leap from AOL's NWN into the expanding universe of MMOs I registered three domain names, steppewarriors.com, steppewarriors.org and steppewarriors.net; I used to joke that they would soon be followed by steppewarriors.edu and steppewarriors.gov. Clearly things didn't turn out as well for the Steppe Warriors as I had anticipated in the late 1990s.

Ultimately, I am pretty pleased with my alternate persona. In doing the research to properly play a Mongol character I have learned a great many things about the Mongols and other steppe peoples. I have eaten a bunch of Mongol food, drank Kumiss, shot arrows from a composite bow (not while mounted though), been in a yurt and made friends with a bunch of people that I otherwise probably never would have met. When I think about how it could have gone another way, if I'd been playing a different Civilization that day when Darryl and I were talking on the phone, or if he and I hadn't played so much of Koei's Genghis Khan together and he hadn't been as receptive to the idea, or maybe it was the fact that he had played in one of my epic Oriental Adventures campaigns that made him cool with the idea. If Darryl hadn't signed on for Mongols, we might have been a Samurai guild or a Viking guild or a Celt guild, they were all infinitely more familiar to both of us at the time; or maybe we'd have gone with something lame like a Dark Elf Ranger guild, who knows?

At any given time I usually have more irons in the fire than is wise, so many of my projects get back-burnered until I get back around to them. Currently I have on hold an Oriental Adventures campaign that just kind of fizzled when it was starting to get good, I had converted the Temple of Elemental Evil for OA and made it the Black Temple from OA1. I have a B/X Viking campaign that stopped when two of my regular adult players got new jobs. I have a B/X conversion for WW II that I spent a lot of time working on last summer, but my regular group, which is mostly my wife and kids and family friends, was lukewarm about play-testing it. I'd say it's an early alpha level right now. I am working on a total rewrite of the 1st edition OA book, kind of recasting it in a form I find more desirable. I just started learning the L5R RPG, I am GMing and the party is about 1/2 way through the adventure in the back of the book, I still haven't found the fumble rule. I have announced several times, prematurely, the start of my 43 AD campaign, so while that should be starting soon, I am going to not say when just in case something happens again. Mostly though, right now, getting a lot of my time behind the scenes, is the reworking of my old Garnia campaign world. We've made some interesting progress on it. I also have a bunch of OSR stuff piling up on my to read list, making me wish I had bought hard copies rather than pdfs because I mostly hate reading off my monitor, but that's where my copies of "Lamentations of the Flame Princess", "Carcosa", "Vornheim", "Adventurer, Conqueror, King", and several other major releases are sitting waiting to be read.

*Out of all of Koei's strategy games for the NES, Genghis Khan had the best multi-player play, Nobunaga's Ambition and Romance of the Three Kingdoms were too slow, and Nobunaga's Ambition II had the annoying "siege mode" in battle.

Dungeons And Dragons: Book of Vile Darkness Trailer

I am going to go out on limb here and assume that they are basing this on 3rd or 4th edition between the straps and buckles leathery S&M look and the unfamiliar spells, but the fight choreography wasn't bad, and they sexed it up some. Maybe it won't suck and it will usher in a new wave of good fantasy films, and bad ones that we will grow to love- like "Hawk the Slayer".



Anyway, I had no games this weekend, my back is still out. I have gotten a lot of thinking, research and actual writing done on my Garnia World campaign, and done a fair bit of reading; mostly about the Chinese, whose culture and history I am weak on, and the Mongols, who I am strong on, but I have a specific area that needed more study. For fun I am still reading "The Mongoliad".

D&D Next Playtest

I know I am a little behind the curve on this one, it's been a busy time for me. My dad has been in the hospital, I had a friend break her leg and she hasn't got anyone else to take her to her appointments, Ashli has had her appointments and even Ember had a dentist appointment stuck in there since I got the playtest packet. I had skimmed the first few pages before and wasn't really happy with what I saw.

Last night I finally got around to reading the entire "How to Play" and "DM Guidelines", as well as all the characters. Having read through most of the packet, I am now much more ambivalent about the entire project. I guess I am going to have to actually play the damned thing to get a feel for it before making a final decision, but my gut tells me that there are some things I am going to like and some things I am going to hate, and a couple of things I am just going to wonder what on earth they were thinking when they came up with that idea?

I suspect those are the 4th editionisms that people in the OSR blogosphere have mentioned, but 4th edition is a real blind spot for me, I took one skim through the 1st Player's Handbook (I have heard they have more than one) and said "Nope, this isn't for me". I had already abandoned WotC D&D with 3rd edition, first for Hackmaster, then I just went back to 1st edition AD&D, but 4th edition was a disappointment for me nonetheless because of the pre-release hype, and at least one playtester's report I read that said he was selling all his 3rd edition D&D stuff while it was still worth something, because 4th edition was JUST THAT AWESOME!

D&D Next, and I hope they change the title, doesn't seem to suck so hard as 4th edition did, and it was nice of them to put the "modular" old school section on the character sheet. They could still FUBAR this edition by adding in all the stupid races from 4th edition when all is said and done, to please their current customer base. I won't be pleased to see Dragonborn as a player race, not in a core book anyway, or any of the other odd races they added just so they could be different from every previous edition of D&D.

As I predicted, Race as Class is dead as a doornail, so we're getting a B/X meets AD&D 2nd edition vibe with a bunch of 3rd edition mechanics and terminology thrown in for good measure. So I guess what I'd like to see are four core classes, Cleric, Fighter, Thief, and Wizard (I know we're not going to go back to Magic-User), and four core races Human, Elf, Dwarf and Halfling (despite my personal dislike for Halflings, they are traditional for the game). Demi-Human level limits are probably gone the way of the Dodo too, so too I imagine are Class restrictions based on Race, so I imagine they'll end up with the 3rd edition style "Preferred Class" or whatever it was called.

I don't have a problem with the game evolving over time, it's evolving it into a tactical miniatures game, that, as DM, I am expected to lose every week that I really have a problem with. I also have a problem with having an actual rule for every possible situation, it steals from the power of the DM and just empowers rules lawyers. So far this seems like a step in the right direction (except for neutering the Cleric). The next time I actually get to game, I guess we'll see.

My son played in a 4th edition D&D game today.

I was going to write about how today was Star Wars day- May the Fourth be with you! and all that, I actually have had Star Wars on my mind as a result of the Star Wars blitz that's just everywhere today. So I guess I'll talk about that a bit first. My first experience with any Star Wars RPG was the D6 West End Games version, and I have a bunch of stuff for the game, and I have run a couple of different campaigns set in the WEG Star Wars system. Sadly, they were failures. Not that fun wasn't had, but something went wrong.

I think part of the reason they were failures was that WEG D6 Star Wars was one of the 1st non-D&D games I ever tried to teach myself and others how to play. I think the other, and perhaps bigger, part of the failure of my WEG Star Wars experience was that my players were all D&D players; sure they were Star Wars fans too, hell they'd been Star Wars fans since before they were D&D players, but the fact that they'd been D&D players for years before WEG came out with their Star Wars RPG meant that they went into Star Wars with a D&D mind set. The D&D mind set is distinctly not a heroic Star Wars rebellion against the Empire type mind set. Yes, people will argue that Han Solo did it all for the money, OK, whatever, he had Jabba the Hutt to pay off. My real problem was that everyone wanted to be shadier than Han Solo, they wanted to be Boba Fett, only working for the rebels, but only because the game made them. Worse than that, after every single firefight, they were looting corpses like in D&D, stripping off Stormtrooper Armor because it was better than their own stuff, taking weapons, real non-heroic, non-Star Wars type stuff; and how do you enforce a "feel" on the universe?

Years passed, I pretty much gave up on WEG D6 Star Wars RPG, I just assumed I'd never find the right group to play with, then the prequels came out and pretty much screwed the whole thing up anyway. I gave WotC D20 Star Wars a shot, I bought every single issue of Star Wars Gamer that the released, yes, I was the one, and eventually I found a group of people willing to give me a shot GMing that game. I dropped the ball there too. I didn't actually own the book at the time, my friend Mark did, I had an introductory adventure to run, which I familiarized myself with, but, to be honest, I am always better with my own material or material that I alter to suit my needs. In my hubris, I assumed that my intimate familiarity with 3rd edition D&D would be enough to get me over the hurdle of not being actually familiar with the specifics of the rules of D20 Star Wars, so I was unprepared I guess. That kind of soured me on the experience, and I was getting soured on 3rd edition D&D at roughly the same time, so there may have been some synergy there.

I had also been hearing via the internet how WotC D20 Star Wars just wasn't as good as WEG D6 Star Wars had been. Then I started hearing things about how a GM that knows too much about a universe can make it suck for the players, and I wondered if maybe that was my problem, I was projecting what I thought Star Wars should be like onto my players, rather than letting them play out their own stories in the Star Wars universe. Mind you, I've heard the same argument made about canon-nazis that question a GM's calls because they violate some obscure bit of canon, and I'd never tolerate that nonsense at my table.

Now, over the last couple of years, my wife has offered on several occasions to run Star Wars games for us, mostly for the kids and me, but I guess anyone in the group would be OK to join; I keep buying new stuff for her, hoping something will catch her interest, I bought the Saga edition book back when it was still available, I have a couple of other Saga edition books I have found on bargains on EBay, I have the D20 Revised and the Original, several copies of each and several sourcebooks for each WotC edition. I bought tons of the Star Wars miniatures, mostly from the first few sets, both because I like the miniatures and because I was using them to tempt my children into playing a tactical wargame with me, it kind of worked for a while. I have even bought more WEG D6 stuff on Ebay over the course of the last year or so trying to tempt my lady into running a game, I don't think it's going to happen.

Then tonight I took my son to a 4th edition D&D game tonight. He made a Thief character, he said it was the most powerful character he's ever played and he kind of liked it. He was the only human in the party.

D&D 5th edition Wishlist

OK, I know I said yesterday that I'd not speculate on what WotC was going to do with D&D and that I'd just get back to my own business, but my contrary brain wouldn't stop thinking about it, so here it is.

Point One- Ditch the full color, expensive art on every page; black & white line art can be just as evocative and it's easier for kids to afford or for parents to buy for their kids when the book is $20-25.00 rather than $40+ . I also would prefer an art direction that takes us stylistically back to a more realistically medieval look rather than dungeon punk, but I may get out voted on that. That said, feel free to mix it up some too, David C. Sutherland III, D.A. Trampier, Tom Wham and Jean Wells all got art credits in the 1st edition AD&D Monster Manual, David C. Sutherland and D.A. Trampier got them for the 1st edition Players Handbook, David C. Sutherland, D.A. Trampier, Darlene Pekul, Will McLean, David S. La Force and Erol Otus got them for the 1st edition AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide; I could go on and list the art credits for various other old D&D and AD&D books , modules and supplements I have, but I think my point is well made- Stylistically these various artists vary quite a bit within the same products and that's OK; all of them can represent D&D.

Point Two- Get rid of the instant gratification. People, even the kids you have been trying to attract get bored when you hand them everything they want on a silver platter. D&D was designed for long term campaign play. Sure, one of the biggest complaints going into 3rd edition was that nobody ever got to play high level characters because campaigns never lasted long enough, dropping the amount of XP required to level alone should have fixed the problem, you didn't need to amp up the amount of XP everything was worth too. I get that nobody likes being 1st level, but everyone feels a sense of real accomplishment when they make it to second, third, fourth and so on under the old rules; now everyone knows that they are going to level pretty much every time they play and it steals the sense of accomplishment from the players and replaces it with a sense of entitlement.

Point Three- Put the danger back in. This goes hand-in-hand with the last point. Since 3rd edition the PCs have been pretty much gods walking the earth, and the encounter scaling system doesn't help this problem. If there is no danger, no real fear of death and failure, then there is no real sense of accomplishment for the players there either. I am not familiar with 4th edition myself, but I have heard stories from my players who tell me that the power levels of PCs are even higher, and therefore worse, than they were in 3rd edition. Get rid of at will, per encounter, per day, per whatever powers; these are still supposed to be people adventuring not superheroes.

Point four- Make skills, feats & powers optional if you include them at all. Obviously I am biased against them, but I might still be playing a new version of D&D if they had made it easy to rip out the parts I didn't like as simply optional sub-systems.

Point Five- Scale back races and classes to the core four, at least at first. I write a lot about 1st edition AD&D and I sometimes lose sight of the fact that post-Gygaxian D&D has gotten way more complex and both class and race heavy than EGG was taking us when he was dismissed from TSR. 2nd edition gave us the endless series of Complete X splatbooks with their numerous kits and subraces. 3x did the same thing and called them Prestige classes instead of Kits. 4th edition, apparently, just published newer Player's Handbooks with new races and classes.

Point Six- Design the entire system first, before releasing anything. Nothing screws things up worse than having a great idea added to a game half way through it's life cycle and then making it mandatory for play. While you're at it remember to fire the first guy that says every class needs to be balanced equally with each other at every level, and then everyone that brings it up again after that. The classic D&D experience was full of unbalanced things and nobody cared, it was part of the fun. People played their characters then instead of these horribly optimized min/maxed things they use for their tactical combat game they call D&D these days. Also, some randomness is a good thing.

Point Seven- Bring back the OGL or something at least as liberal as it was. Get every other game company making product for your game again, it only makes sense, it increases your power and prestige in the marketplace when everything in the game shop says "requires 5th edition D&D to play", or has a D&D logo on it. Hell, give away the D&D license too, let other companies meet a more stringent quality control level and share their profits with you. Lucas does this with Star Wars video games, novels, comics, whatever, all it takes is hiring on a couple of people to make sure they aren't trying to print the adventure "Sex-Slaves of the Under-City" with a D&D logo on it, and if they do, you have the legal Death Star called Hasbro to back you up and destroy them

Point Eight- License official D&D miniatures from every manufacturer that wants to make them and can meet a decent level of quality control and make them all to the same scale and look like the pictures in the Monster Manual and other books, again, this could be done at no cost to you except making sure their product doesn't suck. It really doesn't matter if they are pre-painted plastic or resin or metal, as long as they meet your standard. The cost is all on them and they share the profits with you. They take the risk, you get the reward.

Point Nine- Bring back Dragon magazine as a real, print magazine. Seriously, and make it a real magazine that covers all of gaming again instead of a house organ. Back when D&D was big Dragon Magazine was the one thing that every gamer tried to get every month, players and DMs alike, it had something for everyone. But don't spend more than a third of your magazine space on previewing your own upcoming products, or doing tie-ins to recently released products, or reviewing your own products (unless you have an independent reviewer that's allowed to call you out on a suck product); cover everything in the RPG world, some board game love wouldn't hurt either and I guess I could live with card games getting some space every now and again too.

Point Ten- Don't fuck with us. You say you are going to listen, then listen. Right now you are all conciliatory, you want to re-unite the tribes under your banner. I know this is because you are weak and getting beaten in sales by Pathfinder. Your biggest competitors are your previous editions, that's why the OSR exists. I have spent more money on old TSR product in the last decade than I have on any D&D produced by WotC. If I buy new RPG product at all, my money usually goes to Kenzer & Company, the last time Wizards of the Coast got money for an RPG book from me it was $39.95 for the Saga edition core rules in 2007. I want to love D&D, not OSRIC, Pathfinder, Labyrinth Lord, Swords & Wizardry or Adventures Dark & Dangerous or any other retro-clone, but you are not making it easy.

Point Eleven- Resurrect TSR. Just as an imprint, a separate division within Wizards of the Coast. Wizards of the Coast is a CCG manufacturer and it has the reputation as the company that killed TSR and D&D. TSR invented RPGs. Avalon Hill still gets to be a quasi-separate entity within your empire, and it is a good thing from the perspective that it gives a sense of continuity to the hobby of war gaming. Bringing back TSR would do the same thing I think for RPGs and it would be a show of good faith that you were going to take D&D seriously this time around.

Point Twelve- Release the PDF library of old editions of D&D again. Removing them from being able to be legally purchased made them only available illegally, you created a piracy problem that was almost non-existent by being draconian about piracy and insisting that everyone only play the current version of the game. I didn't need the PDFs for the most part, but I know a lot of people did, that said I would not hesitate to take illegally that which you made impossible to obtain legally if I felt I needed a module or a copy of a book I didn't have and could not find at a reasonable price in the secondary marketplace.

Now, down to nuts and bolts, I would like very much for them to put out a beginners boxed set. Not like the Pathfinder box, although, by all accounts, it is very nice. I want them to do something very much like Moldvay or Mentzer Basic. Simple. Doesn't require miniatures or tokens or a battle map; just dice, pencil, paper and imagination. I think race as class is a dead concept these days, killed by time out of favor if nothing else, so I won't try and push for that. This set should include a players book and a DMs book and a beginners module like B1 or B2 or both, it should also focus on dungeon exploration and the first few levels of play, maybe 1-5.

Follow that up with an Expert boxed set. Give new DMs advice on how to take the game out of the dungeon and into wilderness exploration. Include a module like X1 and a bare bones campaign setting, D&D's the Known World AKA Mystara by choice, my reasoning I'll get to later. This should cover levels 6-15 maybe. Add in a few more modular optional rules, for more granularity if the players and DMs want to add them.

Concurrent with the release of the Expert set, I'd release the Advanced D&D Monster Manual. Every monster in it would be 100% compatible with the B/X sets, they would just have a little extra rules crunch to them that wasn't yet explained. More monster choices are always welcomed. This would probably end year one of 5th edition D&D.

Next add a Master boxed set, obviously by the time you are DMing for characters that are this level, you are probably not a newbie DM anymore, but the game focus and scale has changed and there needs to be advice on how to handle this. More optional rules should be added here, including rules for mass combat and warfare, the governing of domains and the challenges they face and what else to do with higher level characters. Have it cover levels 16+

Maybe a few months after the release of the Master boxed set, I'd release the new AD&D Player's Handbook, it would have a couple more race options and a few more class options. This would probably be where I added an optional skill system, or expanded it if it was already in the game. This is the place to add 1/2 Elves, 1/2 Orcs and Gnomes as player races. I'm not fool enough to believe we can turn back the clock to limit Demi-Humans in either class or level, but I'd make specific mention as an optional rule that some specific campaign settings have specific rules regarding those things.

Probably concurrent with the release of the AD&D PH should be the Dungeon Master's Guide, and it should be a weighty tome filled with advice and tables and all manner of rules explanations and clarifications for the DM. Use the 1st edition AD&D DMG as a guide when designing it, every one since has been lacking. I hear the Pathfinder GM book is quite good though, so maybe you all should take a look at that too. Mostly it should reinforce for the DM that he is there to keep the game moving, if he can't find a rule or there is an argument about how a rule works, it is his job to be the final arbiter; to make the judgment. The DM is not against the players, but he isn't necessarily for them either.

From here you can have a fairly robust release schedule that will keep both the publisher and the consumers, us gamers, happy. For instance, every year we can release a new monster book, this can be done for a number of years just updating the already extant monsters in the D&D/AD&D canon from OD&D up through 4th Edition and including everything from the modules and BECMI/Cyclopedia. Updating classic modules for release in the new edition, you could do one of these a month and get years worth of sales. Battlesystem/Chainmail/Whatever-You-Want-To-Call-It the tactical miniature game will always have a market, particularly if it is integrated into the rules system as a method of handling large combats, and it will drive miniature sales; done properly this can be linked to a more mass scale combat system too and then you'll be able to sell army list books for different factions in different campaign worlds. Speaking of campaign worlds, you own a bunch of them and some of them are pretty damned popular, release a boxed set for each one of them. Run a column in Dragon magazine for your old TSR worlds. I think the ones with the biggest numbers of fans are Greyhawk, The Forgotten Realms and The Known World (Mystara), but that may be skewed by my OSR reading habits, re-release them in their classic forms with the new rules. Once those classic worlds are released, put out a hard cover book for them that will cover all the crunchy rules specifics of the campaign setting for people that really want to amp it up. Region books for campaign settings, like the D&D gazetteer series could keep you going for a while too. Race books could give us sub-races, racial classes, whatever. Class books that open up options for various classes and add prestige classes or sub-classes or kits or whatever you want to call them. Remember Players Option: Skills and Powers and Combat and Tactics? AD&D 2.5, something like that could add back in some of the crunchiness that 3rd & 4th edition fans want for their games, while leaving it optional for the rest of us. New books with more spells will always be welcomed too, so a spell compendium every so often would be cool I suppose, provided it didn't screw with the power curve. 2nd edition AD&D gave us all of those HR books too, now mostly they were not great, but the premise was good

Now what not to do, do not put a rule in a core book and then contradict it in a later release. That's why I said to make the entire system first. If you say that only Fighters can specialize with weapons, then don't let anyone else, even Fighter sub-classes do it, and don't give them an ability that mimics specialization with a different name. If you say in the core book that a Fighter can only specialize with one weapon, don't say in a later book that he can specialize under some circumstances with more than one. If you say that all of your martial classes are going to have their options covered in this one book, don't later release a book specifically for Rangers or Paladins. This applies, obviously, to every class and race. You should also keep to your production schedule for stuff, even if it doesn't look like it's going to sell well, you could always sell it as a PDF or print on demand, but people are going to be pissed if you said you were going to publish the "Kara-Tur Compendium" and you don't. Your word needs to be your bond if we are going to trust you again.

Follow this release schedule and between a monthly magazine, annual monster book releases, classic modules revamped for the new edition, new modules being written for the new edition, and presumably at least three campaign settings getting significant support through boxed sets, hardcover sourcebooks and gazetteers, the race and class books, historical sourcebooks, a possible line of army books for the associated miniature battle game, and more advanced player, and presumably, DM, option books I think that this could easily sustain profits through the entirety of the 5th edition D&D life cycle. Don't expect any love though if there's 5.5 in three years though of 6th edition is in less than a decade.

Hot topics today-

D&D4e makes collectible cards part of their game.

On the one hand I don't care because I don't play 4e. When the game was released I read through the PH and decided it wasn't for me, it had gone a little too far for my tastes from the game I grew up playing. So why should I care?

On the other hand, 4e is the new D&D, it is what people associate me and my hobby with, so I am getting tarred by it's brush. I never liked the collectible aspect of WotC's miniature line for the same reason I never liked CCGs- I like to know what I am buying and whether or not it'll be worth my money. I don't want to have to spend $7000 so I can get enough trolls for the encounter I had planned. Plus they'll all be the same troll mini, that bugs me. I like diversity in mini sculpts.

Also with CCGs there is always some jerk powergamer with more money than sense that builds the awesome deck of always win. You know what "Gamer" card game was awesome? Avalon Hill's Up Front (the Squad Leader card game). You know why? Aside from it's innovative design, you got all the cards when you bought the game. Sure there were expansions released later, but they just added new nationalities. Citadel's Combat Cards were fun too. Sure, they were basically just an advertisement for Warhammer in simple card game format, but if you bought a deck you could play and all the cards for the deck you bought were included.

Religion in RPGs.

Sure it is always there, omnipresent in D&D. A cleric in every party. But does religion ever matter? In my experience no. I have had some players that were really into playing their cleric as, say, a priest of Thor. All anti-giant and combat oriented, cool right? Sometimes. Sometimes it just doesn't work though, largely because, in my opinion, religion in D&D is by default Catholic. That means that being a serious heathen worshipper falls outside the scope of how the class feels. It really shouldn't, there is nothing mechanical about it, it's just that, as designed, the Cleric was supposed to be like a crusader knight. Later this was superceded by the Paladin, but every cleric is still Odo of Bayeux out there wielding a mace so as not to spill blood.

As a DM I have painstakingly created a realistic pantheon of gods and religious observances complete with holy days, based on my mad anthropology and history skillz, only to have it be completely ignored as essentially campaign world flavor text. Helpful for me as DM to set the stage, not so important to the players unless there is a plot hook embedded in the harvest festival. Even clerics (usually) seem less than interested in the day to day, season to season rituals of their religion.

Why is this? I think it probably has to do with the increased secularization of our society. Nobody I play with now or have played with regularly in the past is terribly religious, so they probably don't think about it often.