Introduction and Purpose

This blog is a resource for the players and GMs of the Iourn campaign setting for the Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying game. It is a forum to convert the campaigns that are currently running under third and fourth edition rules,  into a Hybird system (HD&D) that takes the best aspects from all editions of the game. If you’ve stumbled across this page, and you feel you can contribute to the discussion then we’d be happy to hear your opinions.

And with that out of the way:

Dungeons and Dragons fourth edition has proven to be quite effective at splintering the D&D fanbase. There are those that love it, and there are those that hate it. This blog is not designed to get into that sort of discussion. Any trip to messageboards at Enworld, Paizo Publishing or even the Wizards of the Coast site will satisfy any desire you have to champion or rubbish your favourite version of the game.

For reasons that will become obvious as you read the posts on this blog, neither the third or fourth editions of D&D are entirely suitable for the sort of campaigns I like to run. Third edition is the more successful for the two. Eight years of memorable campaigns are a testament to its robust nature. But it has its flaws that are only becoming more apparent as time passes. I played fourth edition for about six months before deciding that it introduced as many problems into the game as it solved. Hence HD&D.

Since 2000 I’ve been maintaining the website that eventually evolved into www.iourn.com , but the standard website format is insufficient for what we are doing here. We are all invested in the unending game to lesser or greater extents, and I don’t really want to make unilateral decisions without giving you all an opportunity to speak up.

The blog is just the tool to do this. It has the advantages of a message board, without a ton of different topics being posted. It is superior to an email discussion where it is often difficult to work out who is replying to what, and someone always forgets to click on the “Reply to All” button. In The Walk Between Worlds I will lead the discussion. I’ll introduce a topic, a rule, a concept and suggest how we implement it. Then you shoot it down in flames.

This is a big project. Every aspect of the game needs to be looked at, and we’re only just starting. I’ve created an index of the HD&D discussions that should hopefully put things in chronological context. I hope together we can create an Iourn that is more mechanically sound than the original, but that doesn’t lose its flavour, its history and (above all) its whimsy.

Of course, the blog did not start out with HD&D in mind. It was originally intended as a forum to work out how to convert Iourn into 4e, and many of the earlier posts, reviews and discussions were to this end.

From the release of fourth edition to the beginning of the first weekly 4e campaign in September 2008, I looked at the rules in the broadest sense. Although I did not want to make any radical changes before I started playtesting there were a number of things I wanted to address: namely the modification of the rules to allow easy play without miniatures and battle grids. However, I eventually realised that there was so much a would want to change in 4e that it just wasn’t worth saving.

Now you can stop reading this page and explore the rest of the blog.