Joey's Musings

Yes. You read the title correctly. There is a blog run by a Red Dragon and his name is Expy. However we’re not supposed to know that. The blog is called Dungeon Mastering and can be found at www.dungeonmastering.com. Now he tries to pass it off that a mere mortal human by the name of Yax runs the site. However, my guess is that Yax is just a Kobold who worships Expy and does the typing because well, let’s face it, it’s hard for a dragon to type with his claws.

Now let’s see what we get when a Red Dragon runs a blog. When you first type in the blog’s address (the URL for you techies) you come to a cool looking front page that looks like it is coming out of the screen at you. I think that is awesome. Now this page has of course the name of the site and a small description under it. Below that are links to various other parts of the site. I’ll go into a little bit more detail about them in a second, just let me finish the front page first. Now right below that is an advertisement for 4th Editon. At first I didn’t realize it was ad ad. I just thought it was a cool animated banner. Personally I hope he never changes it.

Now below that ad there are two posts listed on the left. One is the featured article and the other, at least at the moment is site related post. Now below that it gets divided into two columns. The left most column is a list of the recent posts and the right is a list of series that they have done. All the way on the right side of the page is the sidebar which you will see on all the others parts of the page. This sidebar has the usual suspects, an RSS feed, an email subscription, links, recent posts, related posts and a poll.

Overall I love the design of the site. It is simple and elegant and even though it has ads it is not the annoying Google AdSense or get in your face and make the site look cheesy and crappy ads. Great work guys

Now let’s talk about the reason we all go to blogs to begin with, the actual content. Remember before when I said I would more about those other parts of his page, well now you can stop holding your breath because I am now. Of course it has an About Us page. This is where Expy begins his plans lulling you into a calm about a Red Dragon being involved in a web site and claims to just be a mascot for Dungeon Mastering. Now you will notice three really cool sounding links; Free Adventures, Instant Campaign Builder and Instant World Builder. Expy and Yax has under the Free Adventures a list of 83 FREE, adventures and where to get them. Now to my knowledge neither Expy or his (probably Kolbold) worshipper Yax made any of them but none the less it is awesome to have such a list because there are so many free adventures out there it is sometimes hard to many of them.

The Instant Campaign and Instant World Builders are an awesome tool for both new and experienced DMs (or GMs if you prefer the generic not cool sounding title). Now these are on-line tools that will do the work for you. They are both PDFs created by Expy and Yax which give guidelines on how to create your very own campaigns and campaign worlds without doing too much work. They are based off of a series they did back in the day with tips, tricks, suggestion from those who left comments on the series. Please make sure you download (AND READ) them. They are worth every byte of disk space on your hard drive and the 40 to 60 minutes it will take to read both in their entirty.

Expy has Yax normally posting at least one post a day normally. Sometimes there are two or three posts. Very rarely (if ever) are there no new posts. Many of the articles become part of a series of articles. That is how the Instant Campaign and World Builder started. Currently he has a series called “Pimp My Character” This series just started and Expy and Yax don’t do too much of the work, but let the viewers do it. (They seem to be big into having community participation). How this series works is that people had to send in a basic character concept of no more than 30 words. Then the community would help that person flesh out the character a bit by giving a back-story, list of abilities and powers which could be cool or how the character can fit into an adventuring party. It was also revealed after the first pimping that if more than 50 people leave a comment helping to pimp out this character some of Expy’s hoard would be used to get an character sketch done for this character. So go and help Ian pimp out his character and get a character sketch.

There are two days a week in which there are regularly posted items. One is some very interesting quizzes every Sunday. These quizzes vary in challenge week by week but none are so easy where you will sit there and go “Why should I bother?” I do have one gripe with these quizzes. It modifies your score based on some psychological profiling modifier which add or take away from your score. However it seems to be a random number and not a set system of improving this modifier. But the quizzes are for fun and are not, normally, major competitions. The other is Monday Morning Speed Linking where several sites are listed for your perusal. They are normally somehow RPG related. Expy does find some awesome sites.

PROs

• Run by a Red Dragon
• Awesome design
• Posts often
• Posts are interesting and useful
• Excellent use of graphics
• Great links

CONs

• D&D Books Page link is merely an advertisement (however if you are buying D&D books and you like the site use it so they get some cash to keep producing an awesome site)
• Poll is all the way on the bottom of the sidebar
• The DAMN psychological profiling modifier on the quizzes

On the Joey Scale of 10 being the perfect site and 0 being why did I bother to ever look at this site Dungeon Mastering has earned a 9.5 So head on over to Dungeon Mastering and give it a try. You won’t be sorry, I promise you, unless you anger the Red Dragon of course.