Expected read time: about 4 minutes

So, long time no blog! The truth is that each of us here at Unraveled Archives struggle with mental illness in our own way, and in my own personal case, I was diagnosed with Bipolar II Disorder a couple of years ago. One of the things I struggle with is schedules! And so trying to approach the blog in an orderly manner is difficult, and for a while I thought it wasn’t worth doing if I couldn’t do it ‘right.’

But what is ‘right’ anyway? What is ‘normal’?

I enjoy writing, and sometimes I have a need to write. And so write I will, when I will, and not worry so much about getting articles out ‘on time’. My brain works a certain way, and while I keep trying to figure it out, I’m not going to give up this thing that I like.

So What Have We Been Up To?

While the blog and the site have been neglected, the game design work has gone on! Boy, has it gone on. We’ve got some big things planned, and we’re doing our best to keep their scope manageable.

Mostly, we’ve thrown ourselves headlong into an ambitious project: taking what we love about D&D 4th Edition and bringing it into 5e, in a big way. In some ways it’s almost been like writing a new system. The name’s pending, but so far we’ve taken to calling the project D&D 4ever—pun intended!

And for those of you 4e-haters out there wondering why we would pull anything from that dumpster fire of an edition… I’ll let the following quote speak for me:

Thanks to 5e’s easy modularity, we’ve been able to write entirely new versions of about 20 classes, a bunch of races/species, rewrite all the spells (plus well over 100 new ones), design dozens of maneuvers and exploits for each martial class, rework the feat and multiclassing systems, create new monster stat blocks and redefine the math of Challenge Ratings… The list goes on!

But what’s the point? What’s so great about 4e that we are going to all this effort to bring so much of it into 5e?

I’m glad you asked! Keep reading to find out!

What It’s All About

4e has a troubled history, but it got a lot of things right. In particular, I loved these three aspects:

Heroic Fantasy
Party Combat Dynamics
Tactical Movement

Let’s dive into each of these!

Heroic Fantasy

For all the accusations against 4e not having any roleplaying, I think it has the most text of any edition dedicated to bringing out its narrative aspects. Sure, the rules focus on combat, and encounters tend to be fairly tactical. But on the other hand, every power, spell, or exploit had text going with it demonstrating how to make the most of the story happening along with the die rolls.

And that story was high-action, heroic fantasy. Maybe not everyone’s cup of tea, and that’s alright! But for me, particularly as a DM, I love it when the player characters can do awesome stuff!

Party Combat Dynamics

No edition focuses on the interplay of character features and abilities like 4e, and a lot of that is due to the implementation of class ‘roles’. Each role is like an assignment for what a particular class is meant to accomplish (and be good at) in combat.

I plan to go into more detail on these roles in a later article, but for the moment just know that there are four: Defender, Controller, Leader, and Striker, corresponding to the core four classes of Fighter, Wizard, Cleric, and Rogue respectively.

The Fighter goes toe-to-toe with the toughest monsters, keeping their attention by being a martial badaxe. Meanwhile, the Wizard takes out the weaker mobs of minions with a well-placed fireball or stinking cloud. The Cleric keeps the party up with supportive spells, giving them bonuses to attack and defense, as well as healing when appropriate. And all the while the Rogue is lining up the perfect strike to take out the worst enemy threat.

Every class has a role and goes about fulfilling that role in its own unique way.

Tactical Movement

It’s not mere minutiae meant to bog down combats; 4e’s emphasis on tactical movement all serves to reinforce the stories being told in battle. After all, how is the Fighter supposed to keep the weaker characters safe if the monsters can just waltz past and stab the Wizard? When the Fighter steps in front, he or she is controlling and defining the party’s front line, and base 5e’s mechanics just don’t support that very well.

When movement is controlled (read “limited”), class roles start to shine.

What to Expect

After a long period of quiet, Unraveled Archives is mobilizing to put out a beginning supplement, an introduction to this blend of 4e and 5e. It will present four core classes, one for each role. Can you guess them? There will also be four classic races/species, a smattering of backgrounds, new rules governing movement, and suites of features and spells that help define the roles of characters and enemies.

And speaking of enemies, we’re going to include a small mountain of new monster stat blocks, each one meant to give the party a unique challenge to figure out and defeat.

Considering that all of these options and tools will be limited to characters of levels 1 to 5, it’s still going to be an impressive amount of content. And with much, much more to come!

Wrapping it Up

And that’s all that I have to say for now. If you’re a fan of 4e (or a future fan of 4e), feel free to leave some comments or questions! Do you have a favorite 4e or 5e class? Want to know more about its planned role and what feats of heroic fantasy it will be enabled to perform?

Make sure to sign up for our newsletter, so that you can stay tuned in whenever we put out another article or supplement.

Also, if you happen to be a Spanish-speaker or have Spanish-speaking friends that would be interested in our content, let me know. I’m fluent and would be happy to provide translations for all of our blog articles and game supplements, if I knew there was an audience out there for them. So make yourselves heard!

Take care, happy gaming, and see you in the Archives!

The State of the Archives