TdF and 4E Campaign

Well the Tour is over. Carlos Sastre managed to turn in the time trial of his life on Saturday and held of Cadel to keep the yellow. I really think it came down to the two teams. CSC was incredibly dominant, while Cadel generally didn't have a team mate in site when it crunch time came. It was precisely for the reason that I didn't pick Cadel. As a whole the tour seemed more suited to the climbers which is why I looked at Cunego, who dropped out near the end with injuries. I feel like Sastre winning in some ways vindicates my pick, but oh well. You might ask why I didn't pick Sastre. That's a good question. I guess to be candid I was still bitter from the time when Tyler Hamilton was on CSC and he was supposed to be co-captain with Sastre, and I felt that the divided attention may have cost Hamilton some support. Course Hamilton is so deep into suspension and so old (37) that it's unlikely we'll ever see him at another grand tour.

Speaking of suspended riders next year's Tour could be very interesting. Ivan Basso will be back. Astana with Contador and Leipheimer will also be there (barring any new revelations). And of course I'm sure that Cadel and Sastre will be back as well. Add in all the new revelations from this year like the Schleck Brothers, Bernard Kohl and Vandevelde and before you know it you're talking about a very crowded field of contenders. I'm looking forward to it. I'm also looking forward to the Vuelta a España. They're doing the Angliru. Can you say 23.6%?

The first session of the 4E campaign went really well. I'd printed out power cards for all of the individual powers and that really helped to keep things moving. I would say that combats went much faster than 3E combats, though I'm comparing 1st level 4E combats to mid-level 3E combats, so that's kind of an apple and oranges comparison. I also used some dungeon tiles for the setting. They were a little more difficult to set up than I thought. I had assumed I could just page through and pull some out and be up and running within a few minutes, but it turned out that putting it all together and finding the stuff I wanted was more time consuming than that. I think before the next session I'm going to have to go through before hand and mark the ones I want with post it notes.

I think the part I was most pleased with (other than the player's having fun) was the ease with which I could toss in a variety of interesting monsters and create interesting encounters. This part is as advertised. I can now spend a lot more time on design and story creation, and a lot less time building stat blocks. That part really excites me and it was the promise of that which convinced me that I could do a homebrew, so it's good to see it panning out. I'll have to post the story some other time (assuming anyone is interested) I'm out of time for blogging for the day.

Because you're mine I walk the line.