Took a week off to work on some project before I go to Madrid for a week . . . So this is the beginning of roughly 10 posts or so that will be posted in my absence.
First off all good news for Pathfinder fans: The Fey Folio (#1 at EN World’s RPGnow site!) will be published for Pathfinder as well ~ the process of converting and transitioning these from 4e is interesting to say the least. But I’ll leave that little snippet at that for now.
To say I’ve been up to my eyeballs in fey lately is an understatement.
1. Wrote the Fey Folio
2. Converting the Fey Folio
3. Playtester/Senior Patron (looks like some of my baddies, ideas will be in the final version) on Wolfgang Baur’s Courts of the Shadow Fey (4e)
4. A Senior Patron (absentee unfortunately) on Tim Connor’s Tales of Old Margreve.
Oh . . . and my dog looks like a sad gnome.
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Moving on . . .
One thing I wanted to discuss with my selection of creatures for the Fey Folio is where they came from – my last post deals with that a bit, and if you’ve read those links and have the product, I doubt it is very obtuse to you how things came to be.
So instead let’s talk about the philosophy behind the Fey Folio and other things I’ve brewing.
KEYWORD – STORY
Read the Jack-in-Irons entry of the folio. Now read the dullahan, fachen, spriggan, and GM section (including the skill challenge).
I’d like to think there is a lot of material to work with there.
My goal, and my desire, for ‘monster manual’ type products is to go a bit deeper than simply presenting stat blocks and tactics for creatures you may fight. I want them to feel rounded; I want them to be wellsprings from which a story, adventure, or campaign could emerge from.
Jack-in-Irons’ unique story and his connection to many of the other fey allow me to do that. The DM who uses this material gets a story upon which to seat a lot of these fey. Interrelations are explored, desires of the creatures are given, and items are included to help the GM make use of this book as more than a collection of bad guys.
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A recent reader mentioned how sweet it would be if I could release the xml files to these monsters so that someone could incorporate them directly into the monster builder.
I agree. That would be sweet. However, I imagine that some form of legality must be navigated to do that. It may be something I broach with the publisher, or wait to hear from WotC for. If allowed, I could see this being the new wave of 4e publishing.
However, I know the total epic sweetness of DDI’s suite of tools may deter some buyers of 3rd party products that aren’t adventures. I still implore you to check out the Fey Folio. It is a PDF, so cutting statblocks and pasting them into your pages, or, however, you run your game, should not be too difficult. Also, at most it would take 5 minutes to plot the info yourself into DDI’s Monster Builder.
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Let me leave you with a review from everyone’s favorite internet persona – Wyatt Salazar . . .
Till next time.
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