Recent content by Paul Farquhar

Both Mormons. Probably why they managed to work so well together when Weis didn’t have a gaming background. Not in the churches I belonged to. There are as many different Christian beliefs as there are Christians. Absolutely. They decided they needed to compete with CoC by making it grimdark...

Sure, there is good reason why technology works by magic in those settings.

Really, no, it isn’t. Not if they are familiar guns. The reason Eberron doesn’t have guns is simple. You can do all the cool gun stuff with wands, without having to worry about them behaving in the familiar way.

To make it not the same as Eberron and Ravnica.

They has never spoken of it directly, but we know they put a lot of their faith into the books - which was a bad idea when you don’t have control over them. I think C. S. Lewis would be pretty annoyed if you changed the theology of Narnia (the movies haven’t tried to do that, but they have...

I think it’s pretty pointless going any further if you can’t solve the core issue of rules for non-magical technology - which goes a lot further than just firearms. Magic is the ultimate Handwavium. You can use it to explain anything without worrying about details or realism. It’s D&Ds secret...

The difference is familiarity. Everyone knows how deadly a modern firearm is, or an automobile. But archaic weapons are just unfamiliar enough that the ridiculous D&D rules can just about pass. And of course magic can do whatever the rules say it does without challenge. It’s the main reason the...

Sure we do. You aren’t very up to date. A smart phone is way more powerful than a 1989 cyberdeck in terms of of the range of things it can do. And it’s a lot smaller. That’s the thing - modern technology is not familiar, it moves too quickly. The “familiar” world was the one we grew up in...

Shadowrun was published in 1989. The technology in the real world has long since passed the technology in Shadowrun.

Non-magical hackers go on jobs with their cyberdecks. To not allow tech-based characters to be adventurers is equivalent to banning any class that can’t cast spells from regular D&D. Shadowrun shows how it can be done. It’s quite possible, but it’s a full game not a setting book.

A lot of the negative Vistani tropes (thieves, drunkards) were doubled down on in CoS. Perkins signed off on that, not Hickman.

Which would be a new core class, which would fall outside of the scope of a setting book. Also, that particular class uses frequent weapon jamming as a core mechanic, it’s not designed for modern firearms. An artificer is a fundamentally magical class, with spells and spell slots etc in its...

Even that is getting out of “setting” territory and into D20 modern reboot. But what about when your players say they want to play as a marksman or a hacker? You need new classes for that, fighter and artificer don’t cut it.

What exactly do you mean by this, because it sounds like you are describing Eberron and Ravnica? If you want to have internal combustion, automatic firearms, electrical power grids, mobile phones, computers etc, you are going to need rules for them.

Hickman consulted on CoS, and he was right about how the writers of the 2nd edition boxed set interpreted the original two Ravenloft adventures completely wrong. Weis, of course, was not involved in the creation of Ravenloft, but was clearly irritated by a character she created being taken in a...