WotC_Bruce, 11/14/2007 9:18:43 AM
I just got my copy of Races and Classes, the 4th Edition preview put together by Michele Carter. It is comprised of fabulous concept and finished art for the new game, plus a smorgasbord of essays written by everyone contributing to the 4th Edition D&D game.
My first impression: Wow--it's awesome! Ok, yes, I'm one of the essayists in the book, so perhaps I am tooting my own horn. On the other hand, if you are interested in finding out a wealth of information regarding the nature of the races and classes in 4th Edition D&D (more information, in fact, than will actually appear in the PHB (!)), this is your book.
I don't think it is released yet, so here is a preview snippet of the Humans essay (one of the essays I wrote):
Stories, myths, and legends; people build their identities upon narratives of that describe their past. Is it any wonder that humans, with their vague, ambiguous, and often demonstrably false origin myths, are the most changeable race of any who stride the world?
When the dwarves speak of being chiseled from the bones of the earth, and the elves sing of their leafy birth in the untamed Feywild, humans can only wonder. From what mold did humans spring? What god or primordial fashioned them, then abandoned them to the world without guidance or supervision? Or did they arise, as some learned sages claim, from the clay of the world itself, over millennia of slow variation from lesser beasts?
With no true knowledge of their beginning, lacking any familiarity with a creator, and absent a defined higher purpose a parent deity might provide, humanity claimed for itself the right to determine its own purposes.
