Gnomes, Gnomes, Gnomes

“Winning Races: Gnomes” went live today. If you’re a subscriber, you can grab it here. Want to know what went into this one? Read on.

These short articles are tricky. The fans expect something interesting, some new ground to be broken in just a couple thousand words. They also expect the article to have a benefit for the character they are playing right now. Or, at the very least, inspire them for the next character they might create. I got this. Getting this into 2,000 or so words, well, that’s another challenge.

Ask anyone who’s worked with me and they can tell you I’m not shy about over-writing. It’s a big problem since my check doesn’t get any bigger when I go over. And then there’s the issue of fitting the article into the magazine. Two thousand words for a Winning Races piece is fine. Five thousand, however, isn’t.

I wrote this article almost a year ago. At that time, I felt it was my duty to make damn sure each race had the full range of feat support and options that other more popular races had. My draft quickly bloated with powers and feats, so many the expected 2,000 words became something of a joke. The article marinated on a hard drive for many months until it was deemed ready for publication. At Gen Con, Mike Mearls made gentle fun of the article. He was right to do so. The final product was ridiculous, chock full of what I came top realize were unnecessary crunchy bits.

So I wasn’t surprised to hear from Steve Winter when I made it back to my office in Tennessee. The email was straightforward. Steve wanted me to rip out all the extraneous nuggets and bring it down to a reasonable size. When I cracked the attached draft open, I was shocked by what I had done, how much I had created, and by how much seemed to exist only to fill in boxes. I got to work straightaway and distilled the article into its present form. Rather than use a shotgun approach to cover everything I could about gnomes, I opted to focus the content on gnome tactics through the medium of powers.

I still cast a big net. Gnome specific powers are only attractive to folks playing gnomes. For this reason, I made the powers open to any member of the classes for which they were designed and relied on the story content and mechanics within each power to carry the weight of exploring gnome tactics. Any artificer can snag phantasmal henchmen, just as any swordmage can use vanishing blade. My hope, however, is to help players running gnome characters find new and interesting ways to portray their characters and to guide power choices to reflect personality and background rather than from some mechanical advantage gained from stacking feats and powers.

Now that it’s done and available, I’m pretty happy with the final result. I hope you are too.