Birthright

So, what can people tell me about this setting? What was good? What was bad? What are the good books, what are the bad books? How many books were out for it anyway?

I have very little knowledge on the setting and just got quite a few books for it. So, in the great tradition of placing the wagon in front of the horse now I'd like to know if its any good.

I don't know much about the setting, but there are a few books up for download at this WotC page.

I really like the "Blood Spawn" book. It's one of the best treatments of faeries in D&D, ever .

I recall playing Birthright back, oh, probably around 96 or 97 I think it was. It was whenever the setting first came out (at least in its AD&D edition, if it had any previous ones of which I am unaware). That's a bit ago, so my recollections may be way off, but...

I remember not really being too thrilled with the setting. It centered on the concept that all of the PCs were some sort of nobility (king or other feudal leader, high priest, high wizard, whatever). Gameplay was divided up into a series of turns, each lasting some period on the order of a month or something. During your turn you went about the running of your realm and trying to keep your income up. You had to spend money in the form of gold bars (each bar being 1000gp, I think) to do things.
I fear I don't remember much about what happened during these realm turns because I was the one person in our group Not playing nobility. I started the campaign 2 sessions after everyone else, so all the convenient places in the local power structure were filled. I got stuck with being the commander of one player's army. Since he, as King, oversaw the operations of the army at the level utilized during the realm turns, I had nothing to do. Luckily there was a mechanic built in whereby you could spend 1 gold bar and 1 turn to learn a non-weapon proficiency, so I had a whole ton of them (I recall there being some discussion as to why it cost 1000gp to learn rope use and me figuing out just how much rope you could buy with that much gold).
During one of these turns the DM could thrown in some challenege, like an invasion from another country or a problem with orc raides or what have you. Either the players would send off some of their underlings to handle it or, if you were bored with the realm turn play, grab your advisors (read: the other PCs) and go handle it yourself in the form of a normal adventure.

Now, we may have just been playing the game all wrong, but I really didn't enjoy it. This is likely in part due to my position as army commander rather than one of the useful roles and the fact that the DM gave me nothing to do on my turns but learn knot tying. The actual adventure part ran just like regular AD&D, except that everyone was ludicrously rich for being low-level characters. That wasn't such a problem in 2E days since you couldn't make magic items, but with a 'turn' being a month or more (I don't recall), I can see having currency in 1000gp units at low level becoming a serious problem in 3E.

Birthright was an excellent setting. The best things about it were the way they took a D&D monster and developed a glorious Abomination from it to be a major force in the world. The Vampire was a marvelous translation of Vlad to a small mountain valley realm. The Nameless One, the Swordmage, The Lamia were all great.

The setting had elves that were not sickeningly good. They had a history, teaching humans that came to their lands about magic then seeing them take over the land and strip the forests tha powered that magic. they had real response that held humans away just as they did with any race that had harmed them in the past. The goblin race had kingdoms! they blended goblin, hobgoblin, bugbears into one race and that was cool! BR had halflings that had something dark in their past but had reason to be something other than relunctant burglars! [edit] The orogs were orcs redone as the dangerous and unklnown underground race! Who would have thought orcs could be scary again!

Take a look at one of the maps of a realm. There are buckets of adventuring locales in every map! The one had a swamp with a haunted elven ruin, nearby was a hole in the ground to a former goblin stronghold now held by "something else" and another place was an old wizards tower. Then you had the problems between the various human factions in that country!

The ability to get really awesome spells from magic from the land, it was a very cool concept. The regular magic, the Battle magic, the Realm spells were well-done. Just so many options for handling things and the setting made you want to always hold something back, "just in case".

You have good things to look forward to, enjoy them.

[edit] I read the previous post - everyone had to be on the same 'level' of game standing to have a fun game. Either all players were leaders of something or you ran an adventuring party that might have been heirs to thrones but no one on a throne at the time. The situation he described would suck, not being able to really be active during most of the month long turns.

I ran a good one-on-one campaign with Birthright. The PC was a regent of a country and his "adventures" were split between trying to keep his country together, fighting off a cultural invasion by a competing religious faction, and developing stable trade guilds. Like Planescape, the nature of the setting pushed my game in a new direction -- I'd never before (and never since, really) run such a political/intrigue style game before. Take a look at a couple of my Birthright adventures:

Guild and Evil: http://webpages.charter.net/ericnoah/noahrpg/br-guild.htm (a second player briefly joined the campaign; this was a one-on-one adventure to get the player into the action)

Truth on Trial: http://webpages.charter.net/ericnoah/noahrpg/br-druid.htm (druids -- leaders of the indigenous religion of the regent's kingdom -- are being persecuted by a faction of LN clerics who are spreading dissention and trying to take over the kingdom)

Edit: maybe a better overview/sample is the campaign log: http://webpages.charter.net/ericnoah/noahrpg/birthrt.htm

I ran a BR module from Dungeon titled Seeking bloodsilver in my old AD&D 2e campaign. It was great. I've always wanted to learn more about the setting, but I just never did. I'd be interested to know your impressions from the books you just acquired.

I have most of the books for this setting, except for all those individual domain books aimed towards players. Those I just didn't like and had no use for. The books I thought were outstanding were:

Blood Enemies - A book of all the major NPCs of the setting. This is a fantastic book of NPCs, with great backstory and good art.

King of the Giant Downs - An interesting setting/adventure.

Legends of the Hero Kings - this is a collection of adventures geared towards playing out domain actions.

Overall, I loved Birthright. The various expansion sets and books were generally top-notch. Where I felt TSR fell down with this setting was in the adventures they produced for it. They were generally kinda mediocre.

I have everything for the setting - even the pdf of the book WotC never released.

Birthright was the first NEW thing that TSR did in about a decade. I thought it was brilliant. Very medieval - very fantasy.

As mentioned above, the way of taking Iconic monsters and turning them into unique Villains and Abominations was a stoke of genius.

If you choose to run it as a regency, there are a number of 3E books that can supplement that. War and Fields of Blood being some of the obvious ones. There are others.

One thing which Birthright was underrated for was simply a cool medieval world to just plain adventure in.

One module which captures this feel is one of my favorite Dungeon modules of all time. Seeking Bloodsilver by Christopher Perkins appears in Dungeon #59 and is an excellent adventure. For those who do not like Birthright - I highly recommend it anyways as with a few changes it is an excellent module for any setting. It features a really cool ruined fortress and an extradimensional hook to go to the Shadow Plane where the rest of the fortress lies in an unruined and eerie twilight state. Very cool stuff.

I agree with what's been said. Also, you've got to check out the Book of Regency at the Wizard's website; it's really well done. I used the rules from Birthright as a basis for my own campaign to answer the question "what do a bunch of high-level PCs do while their wizard makes a magic item?" The answers I found in Birthright led my campaign in a new direction. And it was fun.

Birthright was truly unique. Loved it.