Greetings traveler,

Welcome to the sixty-first edition of the alcarin.com newsletter.
There is an archive of the previous newsletters at the Notice Board and the columns are added to the Philosophers Guild, so you can always read them again.
It has been a while since the previous newsletter (13 December 2005). The old mailinglist had filled up with e-mail addresses that were no longer active, resulting in my hosting company being flooded with bounces. I was planning to drop the old list anyway, and had noted this in the previous newsletters as well, but it had to be done a bit more quickly than I had hoped. Since sending newsletters to an empty list isn't very useful, this is the first edition since then. I plan to continue the usual (somewhat) once per month rhythm from now on. The mailinglist has undergone several changes: subscriptions are for a limited period of time, after which you'll receive an e-mail asking you to renew the account, in order to prevent it from filling with out of date addresses again. Furthermore, the newsletter is no longer strictly tied to a month. It used to be the newsletter of month x, but got sent halfway down the next month. ;-) Besides that, the "What's New" section will from now on list updates up from the previous edition, instead of month x, listed per section on the website rather than per date.
As for the general website-related overviewI've moved the site to a new webhost, which gives me much more options for future expansion. Besides that, the first months of 2006 have been very productive. Especially the custom RPG materials in the Castle have seen many additions, such as lots of new monsters, updates of existing monsters, new spells, new items, etc. I've also added a useful "view printer-friendly version" option to content pages, that will display the page in a simple black-and-white version, without the site's layout, banners, etc.
Anyway, thats it for my introduction. Enjoy reading the rest of the newsletter.

This letter's content:
1. What's New
2. Coming Up Soon
3. Column: Men with a Mission

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WHAT'S NEW:

Due the large pauze in newsletters and the large amount of updates, only additions from February 2006 and later are listed below. Since then, the following things were added to the site:

Castle:
Spells: Harmonize Lands, Nature's Call, Remote Apprentice.
Items: Coffin of Endless Torture.
Monsters: Brown Forest Scavenger (update), Gyngor (update), Higri (update), Miniature Rhino (update), Thunder Dwarf (update), Baby Zombie, Striding Vulture, Black Lisk, Yurgim (update), Magma Folk, Horde (Template), Fever Rat Master.

Mysterious Stranger:
Elfstone Campaign Setting: article on the Elfstones.

Bards College:
Poetry and Songs: The Rising.

Gnome Tinkerer:
Mods and Plugins: A Lord's Men version 2.0.2.

Gate:
Cleaned up directory, 14 new links.

(General):
Added "view printer-friendly version" option to all content pages.

Visit http://www.alcarin.com/notice_board/updates.php for the latest updates.

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COMING UP:

The past few months have been very productive indeed, and I expect to have this continue during the coming months. I've got a brand new prestige class for Dungeons and Dragons just waiting to be uploaded. The class is called the "Chosen of the Dark Goddess" and its aimed at vampires and similar beings. More specifically, I've designed it for one of my own characters, a Vampire Scion (a new template described in Green Ronin Publishing's "Fang & Fury: A Guidebook to Vampires") cleric. The prestige class is built around the concept of the romantic, aristocratic vampire (rather than the usual blood sucking monster). Besides that, there might be another prestige class coming up, and I've also got plans for a bunch of new items, spells and monsters. With regard to the spells, I'm working on a series of epic and grand spells that are much more atmospheric than D&D's standard lots-of-damage and death-effect type high level spells.
In the other sections, I'm currently working on several articles for the Elfstone Campaign Setting. I've just added an article on the Elfstones (powerful artifacts that are central to the setting) and I'm planning a piece on Divine Metaphysics, one on the Seven Realms (empires/powergroups), and one on the global geography. I'm also well underway with a new D&D adventure called "The Crypt", and I'm thinking about writing one or more encounter hooks/plots as well. To conclude the rather large to-do list, I'm probably going to expand the artwork section with a few new items soon as well.

For up to date news on these major projects and other major developments on alcarin.com, see the Announcements forum at http://www.alcarin.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=9

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COLUMN: MEN WITH A MISSION
A column by Wouter vd Zandschulp; wouter@alcarin.com

"Origins of Dungeons & Dragons"

I am not quite a big role-player anymore. Actually I rarely do it at all lately. Still, I am the columnist of Alcarin, so I should try to write something about the subject of it. Therefore I did some research on the internet to see how Dungeons and Dragons got started in the first place.

Children and grown-ups always have been playing to be something else. Psychiatrists and people in social studies have used it as a tool. So it's no surprise that games revolved around war-make-believe. Since the time of Napoleon mostly, people saw a lot about war that inspired their imagination. You could say people are inherited to wanting to understand everything. So if they know about some person who gets in some situation, they want to feel how that person feels, by imagining this. Lots of classic games, like Chess stand model for war. H.G. Wells wrote Little Wars, which started up the hobby market for war games in 1913. H.G. Wells also made rules for children's soldier games. Lots of fantasy books and comics later on inspired the fantasy side of role-playing. In the University of Minnesota in 1960 the first fantasy role playing games where played, which they probable preferred to studying. A wargame society came to be. Wargame designer Gary Gygax made up a more medieval setting, called Chainmail. It was historical, medieval, and had room for fantasy in it (wizards and such). Till today loads of games are medieval and full of fantasy. It's a combination that works and attracts a lot of people. Medieval times obviously are found very romantic and tickle the imagination.

Gary Gygax own take on how Dungeons and Dragons came to be:
"So I started to play with military miniatures, and I started to play world war games, diplomacy... And eventually many years later we were playing military miniatures on the sand table of my basement, and we were playing a medieval battle, and everybody had been tired, and so I slipped into a dragon, a giant, a wizard, a hero, and a troll. And everybody said "Oh, this is real experimental, I can get the dragon...". Well, so instead of having half a dozen guys coming to play miniatures every weekend suddenly we couldn't fit them all into my basement. "Many guys. Oh, yes. We never played. C'mon, well, I can read it." So, in 1971 I published a fantasy supplement for that company called Guidon Games: Chainmail, which had all the rules that we'd been using was what became Dungeons & Dragons, because in order to accommodate under a gable we couldn't be everybody on tabletop, so we just started "well, we could do this with paper and pencil", and instead of having lots of figures everybody just has one, and instead of ten people each which sixty figures, we could have thirty people which had one. At that time people were calling me day and night, and they said "hey, we are six guys playing your game and have a problem here, can you tell us how this works". So I had to do two things: First change my phone number and have it not listed anymore, second write down the rules. So in 1972 I did a 50 page set of rules called "Dungeons & Dragons". And it by 1973 became 150 pages. And that was basically what got published in 1974."
(http://www.rpg.net/sites/252/news/13/gygax/e.html)

Well, I can't tell it any better than that, of course. I wasn't there. But it goes to show that most successful concepts are invented by just trying stuff and stumble on to something that works.

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Well, that's it for this issue of the Alcarin Mailinglist. I hope you enjoyed it.
Lord Gildor
"May the stars guide you on your journeys"
http://www.alcarin.com

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