![]() These can get us pretty far, assuming your player group actually likes inspecting things and reading flavor text, but it's no replacement for actual customization or design. There's no way to place free-form buildings in cities and no way to add or remove dungeon rooms – you're bound to your abilities to utilize prefab objects, like vendor carts, statues, chests, tents, and so forth. (Almost) all objects available in Sword Coast Legends' DM Mode. ![]() Maps can be managed to a very limited extent by blocking off undesired rooms with impossible-to-find secret doors, but that's about the extent of dungeon layout management. Sadly, the DM has no means to manually carve dungeon pathing or rooms out of solid bedrock, so we're contained within the confines of the game's random generator. This approach allows for rapid deployment of dungeons and leaves some room for the DM to manually position prefab objects with custom text, quests, or discoverability. Upon creating a location, the game rolls the dice to randomly generate rooms and passages within a DM spec limited to just size and complexity of dungeon layout. We can create bandit caves, cavernous Underdark passages, cities for the dark dwarves, human cities, and similar environments. The Locations screen - Underdark & Faerun are our main options, with 16 total locales.ĭM mode allows players to create locations within Faerun and the Underdark, each using a set of prepackaged thematic “tiles” for the map's generation. Let's go through SCL's ability to enable these items. Sword Coast, in this respect, has been a deep interest of mine since its announcement.Ī good D&D campaign requires unique locations, colorful NPC party members, loot, and story. DM Mode & Tabletop Parallelsįirst of all, I've got around a 9-year history playing tabletop 3.5, 4th, and Savage Worlds, with hundreds of those hours spent DMing. Today, we're tearing-down Sword Coast Legends' Dungeon Master mode, showing all objects available, map tools, and talking about the muted potential of the toolset. That's what we're focusing on in this tear-down.Īll the basics aside, let's jump right in to the review content. There is also a DM toolkit that allows players to build their own campaigns, complete with dialogue, stories, quests, and mob placement. There are two primary modes of play – Dungeon crawls and campaign modes, the latter of which would include the game's built-in story, player-made modules and campaigns, and developer-made modules – all available for free download through the in-game menus. ![]() SCL allows up to four players cooperatively playing in a party, with an optional fifth player as the DM – or Dungeon Master – who plays non-competitively with the players. Other known regions, like Icewind Dale and Amn, have also had their own games or expansions. Salvatore's Drizzt series, and features iconic cities like Waterdeep, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter. Forgotten Realms is a fantasy universe with an extensive population of real books and authors, perhaps most famous is R. Notably, though, we're still on the Sword Coast within Forgotten Realms' continent of Faerun. The game looks similar in some regard to older D&D cRPG titles, like Baldur's Gate, but strays in a few critical ways that we'll discuss here. The Sword Coast Legends DM gameplay footage will give the best idea of how the editor works. The video was scripted, so what you read below will be largely (but not entirely) the same content as I'm saying in the video. The video shows a start-to-finish construction of my module's first two levels, concluding with two players (my D&D group) progressing through the campaign. The objective was to give my old D&D group a run that'd remind us of the tabletop days.īelow is a 25-minute video review version of this article. ![]() This time, I spent about eight hours building a fully fleshed-out module, complete with back-story, multiple levels, and custom quests. I did not get to look at the actual DM toolkit – the utilities used for making longer campaigns and custom modules – until the last two weeks. This DM session dropped me in to a premade dungeon crawl with my staff (“with,” not “against,” because we're playing co-operatively to enable a good experience) my role here was limited to staying one step ahead of the players, trying to plant mobs and traps according to current challenge. Until recently, our only hands-on sessions with the game were as players, with one limited on-the-fly DM session. We've previously covered Sword Coast Legends, with our first round of coverage from GDC – near the game's unveil – and the most recent at PAX Prime. For those of us who haven't yet dug our way out of the insurmountable pile of 3.5 books, the ruleset may be unfamiliar, but it's still D&D. Sword Coast Legends is a newly-released D&D cRPG that has entrenched itself deeply within Wizards of the Coast territory, all the way down to adoption of the 5th edition core ruleset. ![]()
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