Recent content by Paul Farquhar

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...

There is still a completely unexplored continent on the other side of the planet (not XXXX, that was Discworld). Plus the rest of Realmspace, which could be considered part of the same setting. And I don’t think anyone has conclusively proven that Toril isn’t hollow!

More significantly, it has minimal brand recognition.

Oh yes, the "cloned dire wolf".

Yeah, it's a major plot point in Star Wars: The Bad Batch. But this is just more evidence for something that has been suspected to be the case since Dolly.

I’ve read some of those, and the setting might as well be another world with regards to how strange it seems to me. But they fall outside what I would consider urban fantasy in any case. I would call them American Gothic.

That’s tiny! On the small size even for a town (Reigate, a mid sized town, has a population of 150,000). City status isn’t directly liked to size, but when we talk about urban we generally mean populations in at least 6 digits!