So the official tournament for Crypt of the Devil Lich was done at Gen Con in 2004. If you didn’t make it to Gen Con that year, or couldn’t get in to the tournament, it is still possible for you to organize your own tournament at a local game store. One of my local game stores, Dragon’s Keep, decided to do just that. I was invited to be one of the judges and given a copy of the module to run at the tournament that would host thirty players. For a normally non-competitive game, watching payers compete for prizes and bragging rights can be very entertaining.

Whenever D&D players agree to play a pre-published adventure, they never know what they could getting themselves into. It could be an involved murder-mystery, participating in the epic battles of a vast war, a heroic mission to same the world, or just the inane ramblings a wannabe fantasy novelist who can’t seem to get any ideas without rolling dice. The Lost Vault of Tsathzar Rho by Michael Mearls claims to be a classic dungeon crawl adventure, and it looks like a dungeon crawl, and it feels like a dungeon crawl, so it must be a dungeon crawl, right?

Complete Scoundrel is the “Rogue” book that D&D fans have been waiting years for. Ever since 3.0 there have been things that people have wanted rule-wise to help out their Bards and Rogues, and now years later Wizards delivers. Finally there are combat trap options; finally there are poisons that aren't extremely expensive and yet useful; finally there are ways to do certain combat maneuvers (like swinging across something with a whip) that we’ve all wanted--I’m just surprised that it took this long. Of course the big question is: Was this worth the wait?

Back when Rifts was shiny and new, and people were clamoring for more, Sourcebook One was a drink of water for a dying man—it was filled with a Q&A, some awesome robot rules, some neat Coalition stuff, and a cool adventure about an artificial intelligence called ARCHIE. It was great stuff, and we were all delighted to get it, but we knew it was a stopgap; everything about it said “I didn’t fit in the main book, so here I am now to tide you over until the next book comes out.”

Every good connoisseur of Dungeons and Dragons knows that beginning an adventure has two steps. First, they all start in a rowdy, poorly lit tavern where ‘dwarf tossing’ is both a sport and something the poor barmaids have to clean off the floor. There, every intrepid adventurer looks for the 4 basic monster food groups: Fighters, Wizards, Clerics, and Rogues. Once properly mixed the group makes a nice monster dinner salad known as a ‘party’.