Player's Option: Champions of the Heroic Tier

Dungeons & Dragons, 4th Edition

by Mike Mearls, Richard Baker, Claudio Pozas

Player's Champions of the Heroic Tier offers a wide array of new options for all characters. Themes allow characters' pasts to play a role in their future. New backgrounds allow players to create hill dwarves and wood elves. An all new take on rituals makes those magical abilities more useful in the heroic tier of play than ever before.

For wizards, warlocks, and other arcane characters, familiars are useful assistants when exploring ancient dungeons. Clerics and paladins gain access to relics, items imbued with the power of the gods. Professions allow characters to dabble in the more mundane side of adventuring life, while the rules for adventuring companies allow groups of heroes to combine their efforts in new ways.

With option-packed page after page, this book is certain to have something for everyone!

Genres: Role Playing Games, Dungeons and Dragons

160 pages, Hardcover

First published July 19, 2011

About the author

Mike Mearls is the dark hope of chaotic evil: young, handsome, well endowed in abilities and aptitudes, thoroughly wicked, depraved, and capricious. Whomever harms Mearls had better not brag of it in the presence of one who will inform the Demoness Lolth! Has been sent into this area to rebuild a force of men and humanoid fighters to gather loot and restore the Temple of Elemental Evil to its former glory. Of course, Mearls is but one of many so charged, but he is looked upon with special favor and expectation. He and his minions have been careful to raid far from this area, never nearer than three or four leagues, traveling on foot or being carried in wagons of the traders from Hommlet. None of the victims are ever left alive to tell the tale, and mysterious disappearances are all that can be remarked upon, for no trace of men, mounts, goods, wagons, or draft animals is ever found.

Evil to the core, Mearls is cunning, and if the situation appears in doubt, he will use bribery and honeyed words to sway the balance in his favor. He is not at all adverse to gaining new recruits of any sort, and will gladly accept adventurers into the ranks, but he will test and try them continually. Those who arouse suspicion will be quietly murdered in their sleep; those with too much promise will be likewise dealt with, for Mearls wants no potential usurpers or threats to his domination.

(Major points to anyone who gets the above reference)

When not cribbing the bios of well known AD&D 1st edition villains, I'm a game developer at Wizards of the Coast. I work on the Dungeons & Dragons paper and pencil RPG and the Dungeons & Dragons miniatures game.