Sometime during the passing of the potatoes or as you’re chewing that big bite of turkey, someone at the table inevitably asks you: “So what do you want for Christmas this year?”  Meeting their wild-eyed gaze, you realize that while they are physically here at the Thanksgiving table, their spirit is already formulating the strategy for their frantic shopping raid on Black Friday, and need to know your deepest Christmas wishes, so they can plan their mercantile smash-and-grab to perfection.

Thankfully, this year I was prepared for the “big question”, and opted to suggest that this year the best gift for me would just be an Amazon.com Gift Card!

It’s not that I don’t trust my relatives and friends to buy gaming stuff for me, but honestly, I’m not sure what I would have them buy that I don’t already have!  I’ve been pretty diligent about picking up D&D 4E products – as you may have noticed from my reviews on here and on En World – and December is looking pretty light from a D&D game release point-of-view.  Being a recent convert to R.A. Savatore fandom, I’d like to check out The Sellswords: A Forgotten Realms Omnibus with the whole trilogy in it, but as far as actual D&D 4E supplements go, there isn’t much I would want.  I’m inclined to pick up the D&D Gamma World Expansion: Famine in Far-go: A D&D Genre Supplement , but the campaign that played Gamma World would doubtless clamor to take yet another “Gamma Break” from the regularly scheduled Forgotten Realms adventures – and I’ve been dying to unleash the awesome Underdark adventure arc that I have been working on for a couple months now.  But I suppose if I get Famine in Far-Go, I’ll run it for my group, because Gamma World has been a heck of a good time – but only if someone gets it for me as a gift!

As far as older 4E releases, I would not be disappointed with a copy of the Dungeons & Dragons: Castle Ravenloft Board Game .  It looked really awesome at GenCon 2010, and might be a great diversion on gaming nights when we’re missing a player or two.  Having a cool “beer & pretzels” style board game handy is never a bad idea when you run a D&D campaign full of 30-something and 40-something parent types with an assortment of “rug rats”…

From a computer gaming perspective, last year I was looking at solo fantasy RP games like Dragon Age – which, by the way, was an incredible play-experience!  But this year, I’ve been sucked back into World of Warcraft, and when I am not working on D&D 4E blogs and adventures, I’ve got the whole of The Cataclysm to keep me preoccupied.  I’ve already pre-ordered my copy, and am looking forward to put my poor ice-rimed Northrend-weary Dwarven Paladin on vacation someplace warm (like in a lava flow), and trying my hands at a Worgen Druid!  Of course, a ton of WoW gamers will probably want to try out the new fur-covered player race, so I imagine that the Worgen starting lands will be more crowded than a Times Square on New Years’ Eve.  But I am really curious to see what the new low level play experience is like in the post-Cataclysmic lands of Azeroth, even if I will spend hours pointlessly fighting over spawns trying to complete new “kill X number of Y and return to Z” quests.  So I guess I’m not exactly in the market for a new fantasy RP computer game this year – but then again, I could always use a gift of more WoW Game Time!

But no matter what I get, I still hope that everyone had a safe and enjoyable Thanksgiving Holiday, and assuming you’re brave enough to battle the crowds, a lucrative Black Friday shopping excursion!  (Personally, I’ll stick to mail-order for my Christmas shopping!)

So until next blog… I wish you Happy Gaming!

Tags: black friday, D&D 4e, discussion, wishlist

This entry was posted by Editor-in-Chief on Friday, November 26th, 2010 at 10:33 am and is filed under RPG News & Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.