MicroMark is a fantastic resource, but they slip under the radar of a lot of wargamers, since they primarily market themselves to model railroaders / scale modelers. While there is some specialized stuff in their catalog, they have a lot of great stuff for anyone who paints or builds terrain. (I first learned about them when I took a terrain-building seminar at GenCon from David Dresch). The things above were all on my "wish list" for a while, but they did a 50% off sale last week that finally got me to bite. From left to right: pearl tweezer, micro hand drill, micro holding tool, wood strip cutter, & paint mixer. I'm using the wood strip cutter for plasticard, and it's worth it's weight in gold (or at least in plasticard) since it's already saved me tons of waste from futilely trying to cut thin strips by hand. The paint mixer seems a bit lazy, but I'm using the airbrush more lately, and the GW Foundation & other high-pigment paints can take forever to get thoroughly mixed by hand.
I also picked up the new D&D Essentials book, Heroes of the Fallen Lands:
... I mainly picked it up because there are some new powers for my cleric that don't appear in the Player's Handbook, and my DM mentioned that they've rejiggered the feats, which were notoriously fiddly. I've only glanced at it so far, but I like the new size & format, and the fact that it's softcover (maybe that's just because the memory of lugging four full-size hardcover 4th Edition books to my game last weekend is still fresh in my mind). I'm not thrilled that it appears Wizards isn't making anything other than the errata available to players who have already bought the 4th Edition handbooks - not to mention that I've had to buy three separate Player's Handbooks for 4th Edition, and the last one was just released seven months ago...
To be fair, two of those "Player's Handbooks" are more like "new classes and races to add to your game" books - more traditional supplements than "new" Player's Handbooks. They don't replace the PH, just supplement it. HotFL really is a new version of the Player's Handbook (and Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms looks to be another one). I'm also not sure what else they should provide other than eratta, since the older books are still valid and supported for the game - the new books have new options, but the older books are still useful and nothing other than the eratta'ed rules have changed. As I see it, these new books are much like "Martial Power" or "Arcane Power" - new options, but you could still play the game with just the Player's Handbook if you want to. Though I have to say I like the price point on these new books much, much more than the price points on the splat books like Martial Power (which I've tended to skip or wait until I see them used before picking up).
ReplyDeleteYou should browse the weapon feats and the Divine Devotion feats and see if there's anything that piques your interest. Don't let the flavor of the Divine Devotion feats make you feel like you're locked out of taking them because of the gods they're associated with - we can always re-theme them as needed to fit your character.