Recent content by Ajax1979

There's more good advice in this thread than in some classes I've taken on topics like this. I went through something very similar about a year after I joined this forum and did not start reposting until this year. After undergrad I could not find a job in my chosen field. I got a retail job...

I love Green Ronin's Advanced Bestiary. I used to be a sucker for new monster books. It didn't make sense to pay $30+ for a new book and only use six or seven monsters in it and most of those only once. I have a stack old issues of Dragon and Dungeon I use every now and then.

To me the difference is that Leiber's nonhumans behave like humans. His ice gnomes, rat people, ghouls, invisibles, and devourers are more like people in costumes than species unto themselves. Sheelba and Ningauble may look weird but they behave like the wisemen/women of dozens of fairy tales...

I started playing with the Mentzer Red & Blue Books and even after playing for 2/3 of my life I still gravitate toward those books. Even if I'm playing 3rd I use a very small set of monsters. I'm also pretty hidebound on wanting a Tolkien/Anderson/Leiber sort of game. Some of the oddballs just...

One again: just really cool work. Excited for Squerikk and the other lycanthropic deities!

Great work all around. I like Ramenos as a bit more of a warrior and conquest deity and Skerrit as more of a Greek centaur (good job with those obscure centaur demigods from back in Dragon) but your work is first rate. Thanks for sharing it.

I have nothing against Birthright. It just really feels like a world made by committee. To me Birthright is the beautiful house where no one ever lived. Greyhawk and FR were homebrews. Dragonlance had novels and Mystara had a long series of articles in Dragon Magazine. Birthright showed up fully...

I use a mix. Typically I'll pull a few modules before a campaign starts and think about how I might use them. Sometimes I just steal an encounter, NPC, or item and ditch the rest. Some older modules (In my case B2 and B4) are so useful I feel I'm shorting people if I don't use them. At the...

Perhaps you could introduce a sage character of your own, play that character in the way which seems natural to you, and not worry that you've got Elminster "wrong." For every way that Elminster can be played there is a camp who will find fault with it. As he is an actor almost any set of...

Ascending AC is something I have embraced in D&D games I run. It makes so much more sense to me. Even some retroclones use it. I think some of the deities in 2nd actually got too much flavor. Particularly in FR where deities got five and six pages each. Having a player after a game ask if this...

What makes Mystara special to me is it's a setting that acknowledges and embraces the crazy things players want to do in a magical world. Become a god/immortal? Sure. Build a flying ship shaped like a winged lion? No problem. Rule a country? Play as a troll? Fight an army of 33-HD gargantuan...

#78- "Citadel by the Sea" the most useful adventure after KotB, fixed psionics, and details on the Deryni series. Just talking about specific articles: #50- Glyphs of Cerilon by Larry Ditillio #59- Toxins of Cerilon: will cure your forever from poisons that sound like blood types. #58-62-...

Wow. I'm sold. I never thought this series would be collected. Rags Morales really went on to do some great things. Wish this had come out a few years ago. Vartan and Omen have made several cameos in my current FR campaign. With that page count it should take three volumes to finish the...

This was one of the first issues I ever bought. Jason Dunn's letter still sticks in my mind. What got me was that these orcs were not living in a "Tucker's Kobolds" deathtrap. There wasn't anything out of the ordinary about the lair. They just had the foresight to post sentries and have an...

I really liked this setting. What little bit of background was written was topnotch. There was an old, old thread (and I may not even have the correct forum) where someone compared the "Sundered Empire" map with the map of the Greyhawk world from Dragon Magazine Annual #1. I really could see...