Scrying The 4e Crystal Ball - I Wish...

Welcome to a new feature here at the Velvet Dicebag, Scrying The 4e Crystal Ball. No, sadly I have not been gifted with true foresight (or maybe I was and am just finding myself the perfect man instead of sharing the gift with others). Instead I've done all the dirty work, prying those precious new edition secrets out of the hands of the dead... which is to say I've browsed around a whole lot to get the good dish, just for all of you. I'll be collecting the dirt on 4e of D&D throughout the week and posting some of the choicest tidbits every Thursday.

So what's new this week, you ask? Ah, well if I could wish... but I can't! The spell is GONE GONE GONE from player spell lists in 4e, according to this tidbit from one of the posters on Enworld who cornered David Noonan over the weekend. While certainly not the only spell that will be disappearing from player reach, wish is one of the most iconic spells in the game. Whether this change means that djinn and efreet will lose their mystical wish granting abilities is still an unknown. There has been talk of monsters retaining some abilities denied to players, so that elusive wish may not be completely out of the players' grip yet.

The other major news this week actually comes directly from Scott Rouse, the Brand Manager for Dungeons and Dragons at Wizards of the Coast, who confirms something important in the world of 3rd party publishers of rpg products: there will be no d20 STL. There will only be the Open Game License (OGL) and Dungeons and Dragons. This means that ubiquitous d20 logo that showed up on frankly a whole lot of less savory publications fairly early on during 3.0 and 3.5 will not be appearing this time around. It also means that there will be continued third party support for the world's most popular role playing game under the auspices of the OGL, which can only be in the best interests of players. Whether the third party companies will actually provide that support, well, that's a topic for another column...