new.digg.com/story/some_thoughts_on_d_d_essentials

So if you go  to the new digg and you can't get on you should shead a little tear and then request a beta account. Because all of the Lords of Tyr stories are automatically submitted via our RSS feed as of like a week or so ago.

So then once you are on the new digg your should digg all the Lords of Tyr articles so they get dugg.

Check it out ok and tell all your friends!

 From "Hail to the Chief": 

This is my last month working on Dragon and Dungeon magazines. As many of you have heard, we’ve reorganized here in RPG R&D. We’re moving into a brave age of new media and new ways to play, and we’ve got a fresh, upstart team of rogues and renegades dedicated to bringing D&D fully into the 21st century. We’re calling it the D&D New Business team, and I’m excited to say that I get to be part of it. My new title is Digital Games Manager, and part of my new gig involves working with the D&D Studio to help with the content for all the tools and other digital gizmos for D&D Insider. The other part involves … well, all sorts of projects, none of which I’m really able to talk about. NDAs, and all that. What I can say is that it’s exciting, and I can’t wait to share more—to our D&D Insiders, of course.

Wow...we need a lot of Game Recap. 

SoW recaps:

Arby soils an alley.

Vala saves the day.

Fungus? what fungus.................yeeeeeeooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.  <<thump>>

Bad, bad puppy.

The vile wraith encounter.

H2 recaps:

Is the halfling a friend or foe?

Shopping at the mall.

Okay...two pronged attack...Crap! this door is locked!

Never split the party/Where did the druid go now?

Medic!

(Oh do we have a Party name yet?  like "Heros-who-bleed-alot"...

Also, summary of the new maptools features we are using.

-Mike

This past Wednesday night the Lords of Tyr started a New tradition! The weekly summer game night. I had been thinking about this for quite some time. Mostly because some of our members' life and work schedules have kept them from being as regular as they would like. So I finally got my butt in gear and got the first few encounters ready from the H2 Thunderspire Mountain adventure.

I figured we would get maybe 4 or 5 players tops. Instead I got 7 players! I had thought, incorrectly, that this would be our small nimble game... nope! Because this game was during the week, it was going to rely heavily on Skype and MapTool. Skype just released beta 5.0. This version allows up to 5-way video conferencing. That means that at least 4 of our players can have 2-way video. That will certainly help with some roleplaying.

MapTools usage means that I really needed to focus on visibility lines and lighting to really help get a more immersive experience. Overall I was very happy with the results.