James' Work

Eberron Campaign Setting

June 2004.

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Of all the projects I've worked on since I started work at Wizards of the Coast nearly four years ago, this is my favorite.

My involvement started pretty early on. I volunteered to work on it when we did our annual, "Hey, which of these projects do you want to work on next year?" thing, and so I got involved in meetings when the setting search was down to three entries. Once folks with more authority than me picked Keith's entry, I was in a lot of meetings with Bill Slavicsek and Chris Perkins from the RPG group, Peter Archer and Mark Sehestedt from the book department, and Keith himself to hammer out the shape of this new world, using Keith's proposal as a starting point. It was a fantastic collaboration—there's nothing quite like that experience of sitting in a room with five brilliant people bouncing ideas around, which is probably the single best thing about working at Wizards.

My design work on the book consisted of most of the rules material—races, classes, feats, spells, and some of the prestige classes and monsters. My writing has been through a lot of development since I turned it over in May, but I'm still quite proud of my work that's in this book. In many ways, the development process was a continuation of the great collaboration that started the process, with the development team frequently bouncing their ideas off me to make sure they weren't taking things too far away from the original intent.

The biggest payoff so far has been sitting behind a mirrored window watching Chris Perkins run an adventure for a focus group of local RPGA members (who have been sworn to secrecy)—and seeing how excited these grognards got about the setting. Give it a look when it comes out—I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Player's Guide to Faerûn

March 2004.

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This is the long-awaited 3.5 update for the Forgotten Realms, but it's so much more than that. If that had been all this book was, I would not have volunteered to write half the book as a freelance project. The reason I leapt at the chance was all the other stuff we crammed in this book.

Stuff like a DMG-style entry for every plane in the convoluted cosmology of Faerûn, revised and expanded to address the questions and concerns that the new cosmology has sparked over the last three years. Like a chapter on using the Epic Level Handbook in an FR game, and another chapter on vile and exalted material (not mature content). Material on using psionics in FR. Cool new prestige classes as well as revised versions of old ones.

The revised stuff is cool too, and in many cases much needed. See, the reason that material is in a book like this and not in a free update like we did for books like Deities & Demigods, Manual of the Planes, Monster Manual II, and the Epic Level Handbook, is that we really went back over the older material and revised it. The 3.5 Accessory Update was based on the assumption that all those books just needed some tweaking to make them compatible with the revised rules. This book goes back over existing FR material and subjects it to the same scrutiny that the Player's Handbook went through. Broken spells are fixed, regional feats are attractive again, prestige classes are cleaned up.

There's a lot of great material in this book.

Book of Exalted Deeds

November 2003.

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The good twin of last year's Book of Vile Darkness, this book takes a good hard look at what it means to be a good guy in the D&D world. Why is it a mature product? Primarily because its mission was to look at morality in the D&D world from a mature perspective. A lot of players don't want to think about things like what to do with the orc babies. Few sorcerers would try to convert a slaad lord to good, but Veshann tried.

Whatever you thought of Book of Vile Darkness, don't judge this one until you've seen what's inside. You might think of it as the player's companion to a vile campaign, or as a guide to the straight and narrow in a world of greed and violence. If you use it, your campaign will be different. I hope it will be better.

Maybe you might even be better. Isn't this all about being a hero?

Draconomicon

November 2003.

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All about dragons! I coauthored this book with Skip Williams and Andy Collins, in about equal parts—talk about good company! My parts included playing dragon PCs, dragon prestige classes, spells and magic items, and some material about dragons in combat. It seems like the book is taking forever to come out—I finished my work on it just over a year ago. But it will be worth the wait. And the art is awesome.

Dragonlance Campaign Setting

August 2003.

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I was the lead developer for this book, which was written by Margaret Weis and her colleagues at Sovereign Press. I put a whole lot of effort into this book to make sure that the rules both work well within the d20 System and are true to the Dragonlance world. It's going to be a pretty awesome book, and by far the best campaign setting treatment that Dragonlance has ever received.

Incursion: A World Under Siege
Knights of the Lich-Queen

July 2003.

These two articles appear in DRAGON and Polyhedron magazines, but together they're larger than my contributions to, say, Defenders of the Faith or Monsters of Faerûn. This is the project that had me insanely busy toward the end of 2002, which I seem to never quite have recovered from.

Anyway, the DRAGON article is all about running a campaign where the githyanki are invading. Since one of my setting proposals was very similar to that concept, I had a lot of ideas to run with. Plus, one of my best friends is a military historian, so he got a consulting credit on the article.

The Polyhedron piece is a d20 minigame that's a lot more like most of the d20 products on the market than Poly's usual fare. By that I mean it's really a D&D supplement, a Monstrous Arcana: Githyanki book in d20 terms—chock full of all the hard rules you need to play a githyanki PC on the other side of the invasion.

Incursion is an event that runs through all three magazines. The DUNGEON component is an adventure, "The Lich-Queen's Beloved," written by the inimitable Chris Perkins.

Get these magazines. This event is not to be missed.

Fiend Folio

April 2003.

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Not the Monster Manual III, and not a collection of stupid monsters put together by British people. No, it's a monster book with a fiendish slant: not just evil outsiders, but other types of creatures from the lower planes, just plain nasty monsters, prestige classes for fiends, and more. Look carefully at my Mahasarpa Campaign Journal: Anathema. Blackstone Gigant. Mmmmmm...

I don't know why I'm the only author listed for this. I was the lead designer and lead developer, but these folks shouldn't be consigned to oblivion: Eric Cagle, Jesse Decker, Matt Sernett, Chris Thomasson, James Jacobs, and Erik Mona. They all did a fabulous job.

Arms & Equipment Guide

March 2003.

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Lots of cool gear for your D&D character. I wrote 32 pages of it, filling in gaps left by the other designers. I compiled some existing magic items from previously-published adventures, wrote new magic items, cursed items, intelligent items, and artifacts.

Epic Level Handbook

July 2002.

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In my opinion, the coolest thing about the Epic Level Handbook is that playing epic-level characters still feels like D&D. My contribution to the book was pretty small: I did the epic dragons (including the oversized great wyrms) and the updates to the Forgotten Realms NPCs near the end. It came out to a little over 20 pages of the 320... but I still love this book.

Deities and Demigods

April 2002.

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It's started making its way into stores, and I've got my three copies... Read my random thoughts on my DDG page.

Oriental Adventures

September 2001.

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A 256-page hardcover book featuring rules for playing D&D in Asian-themed settings. Read more about it on my OA pages.

Defenders of the Faith

May 2001.

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So, the ex-minister writes half of the guidebook for clerics and paladins. Typecast? Oh, well. It was a blast to write.

Cool prestige classes. New spells. "Prestige domains"—the coolest way to work around a design mandate I've seen in a while. Church information. New things to do with positive (or negative) energy. Equipment, paladins' mounts, and lots of roleplaying advice. And even a passing mention of the infamous troll barbarian, Skurge.

Incidentally, that horned guy on the cover is Daros Hellseeker, the tiefling cleric from The Speaker in Dreams. Making an impact on Jozan and Alhandra. :)

Read the wizards.com Personality Spotlight profiling me and Rich. Also download the web enhancement: suggested divine missions for clerics, and spell planning sheets for clerics and prestige-class divine spellcasters.

Monster Compendium: Monsters of Faerûn

February 2001.

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While its release date is a month after The Speaker in Dreams, this is actually the first project I worked on after being hired at Wizards of the Coast last January. It's exciting to see it come to fruition! The book looks almost exactly like the Monster Manual, except for being softcover. The pentagonal shape in the center is larger and contains the image of a spellcasting shadow dragon you can just make out on the image here. Inside, the page look is the same as the MM.

Should you buy this book if you're not a Forgotten Realms fan? Absolutely. We don't even use the FR logo on this book, though the words "Forgotten Realms" appear in small type down by my name and Rob's. Each monster includes a paragraph describing the monster's place "In the Realms," but as often as not these are adventure seeds that can be worked into any campaign. The monsters themselves were selected because they have some of the character of the Realms—high magic, sometimes bizarre characteristics, a certain amount of whimsy maybe (but not silliness: we cut the faerie dragon and the wingless wonder). There are exciting monsters in here: the deep and shadow dragons, the yochlol and the draegloth, three new lycanthropes, greater doppelgangers, perytons and leucrottas, beholder-kin and giant-kin. There are new templates, and new powers for ghosts and liches. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

Read the wizards.com Personality Spotlight profiling me and Rob, and be sure to check out my web enhancement for this book: expanding on the "In the Realms" section for the ghour and the stinger. Also, the February 23rd Character Closeup features a monster from this book, a yuan-ti "tainted one."

The Speaker in Dreams

January 2001.

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My first publication as a designer on the Wizards of the Coast staff! The third in the so-called "Adventure Path" (after The Sunless Citadel and Forge of Fury), The Speaker in Dreams is a story-based city adventure—a pretty radical departure from the previous adventures.

I wrote an extensive piece about this adventure on Amazon.com... click the "Order this book" link above to read it.

Due to some quirk of the typesetting process, the printed adventure has a total of just over a page of white space. This is deeply ironic, considering that I overwrote the adventure by nearly 50%. Don't you dare complain about it, though, because Wizards of the Coast has graciously made available a just-over-nine-page web enhancement for this product that includes much of the material I had to cut, as well as some new stuff. Basically, you're getting a 40-page adventure for the cost of a 32-pager.