This smallish book (19 pages, not including OGL or title page) offers a new approach to handling roleplaying skills and encounters -- and should work in any d20 System based game, even most of the ones that no longer use the logo.

These rules take a different approach in an effort to make it feel more like the character’s skills have a direct impact on the way the roleplaying of the scene plays out, without reducing the entire exchange to a die roll. The idea is to help the player be a better negotiator, by giving them special benefits based on their character’s skills.

The basic premise is that each of the major interaction skills, Bluff, Diplomacy, Intimidate, and Sense Motive, offer a variety of special talking actions. While roleplaying out an encounter, the player can make a skill check for their character and, if it succeeds, gain some special benefit during the roleplaying of the encounter.

For example, if Talarn tells the leader of a barbarian tribe that Talarn’s group just took out the goblins in the nearby hills, then realizes that the barbarians were actually quite friendly with those goblins (perhaps by noticing all the weapons being drawn), then Talarn could use the Bluff skill’s Take Back action to make it as if Talarn had never said that.

For more information download the demo.

The full version is available for purchase at RPGNow or at the ENWorld Gamestore.

Back in the early days of the d20 license there was some concern that, since the descriptions and illustrations of some of the monsters were not in the SRD, we could not use those in open content products.

To address this some people volunteered to create new descriptions for those creatures -- ones that made sense given the abilities and attributes in the open content, but were original and thus could be used by other publishers.

I contributed a few descriptions, and I think that project has since vanished into the ether, so I thought I'd reprint the material here.

I'll link to each one as a seperate article:

• Azer
• Rast
• Ravid
• Salamander, Flamebrother
• Salamander, Average
• Salamander, Noble