I couldn't use skills and powers with Dark Sun. And I couldn't use the character sheets for either, without making modifications (and that kind of defeats the purpose of premade character sheets, doesn't it?). Each product was mutually exclusive.
And oh god, it got worse. We all loved the Dark Sun setting - it was (and is) my favourite setting of all time. However, at the time, we didn't have the psionics handbook (the one I bought got stolen - I've had my 2e psionics book stolen TWICE now). We didn't have the monster book, and Dark Sun has a shortage of monsters if you lack that book. I couldn't get my hands on either book, either, due to my own funds shortage.
I think there was a Dragon article around that time that did Skills and Powers for Dark Sun, though naturally if you didn't have access to the magazine, it wouldn't do you any good. At the very least, you'd probably need to use that issue and Skills and Powers to hammer out some house rules on it, and maybe use stuff from Spells and Magic too, since it had an optional magic system based on defiling.
I'm torn on the moster supplements. On the one hand, monster books tend to sell well. On the other hand, they were putting out tons of monster supplements at this point and by then, they'd really soured people on the quality of the monstrous supplements and they were feeling very forced and slapdash.
I have two of the 95 monster suppliments, the second Annual and the second Planescape book. I think they're both good, lots of interesting variety in them, and the PS has monsters that can be used even in a regular campaign (some eventually ended up in the 3e MM). Didn't buy the Dark Sun one, but I think some of those monsters were put in the next year's annual.
I liked the Annuals for the most part, they had a good collection of monsters from a variety of sources, as well as updated stuff that had been OOP for a while. YMMV vary on this though, since the 2e Annual was the one that reprinted the flumph for 2e.
IMO the worst annual was the third, there wasn't really any theme to it (unlike the last one which included a nice chunk of aqautic monsters), and a lot of setting specific stuff was just copied and pasted without any attempt to make it useful for a generic campaign.
I think I would have taken the Night Below project and expanded on it.
a) Release a crunch centered revised 'Dungeoneer's Survival Guide'.
b) Release a fluff centered 'Night Below' generic campaign setting. The thing about the Underdark is that most campaigns have one. Personally, I'm not a big fan of the 'Boxed Set' format. You are paying for an expensive box and you can't look at the content to see if you'd really want to buy it. I'd prefer either a thick soft cover or a some sort of cheaper packaging for a bundle of books. I notice that the format didn't last much past TSR folding.
c) Release the Night Below campaign as a 4 part module series possibly also with an option to buy all four in a single bundle.
d) Release a monstrous supplement that was Underdark centric as the annual monstrous supplement.
You know, I bught Night Below thinking that this is what it was. Being relatively new to D&D, I was hoping for a nice big set of material on the Underdark. All I got was a big boxed adventure. Not a bad adventure, but not as helpful as I was hoping.
Celebrim - The Encyclopedia Magica books were the magic item books not the spells. I actually bought all four of these and loved the everyloving crap out of them.
But, I can totally see people not wanting these.
I managed to collect all the Compendia. The first EM was released just as I was starting to get into D&D, and I saw a copy at B. Dalton and flipped through it. I thought all those magic items were amazing. There's all kinds of cool stuff in that volume, and it just goes to D. There's 3 more filled with all kinds of stuff like that. Naturally, they were one of the first products I tried snapping up. For a novice player like me, it was a great source of stuff, though I hadn't mastered placement of magic items, so there was a lot of stuff I thought was cool finding its way into the dungeons I was fleshing out.
The spell compendia were similar, in fact the first indication I had of TSR's troubles was when I was waiting for the second spell compendium to come out in 1997, I was ordering stuff from a local comic shop by then, and the owner kept telling me the distributor didn't have it.
GregK - how did you manage to use both Complete Priest and Faiths and Avatars in the same game? Complete Priest cut clerics down to three or four spheres (if you had anything approaching a standard cleric's combat abilities) whereas the Faiths and Avatars were a powergamers dream. These two books were pretty much the polar opposite to each other mechanically.
I can't speak for him, but I used them together with the Player's Option books to custom create specialty priests. So say I was creating a war god. I'd look at the powers and spheres given to priests of Tempus and the like in F&A and the war priest setup in the CPH, and write them all down. Then, I'd go into Skills and Powers and Spells and Magic, and use the point based system to assign powers to the custom class from the list I'd created.
Encyclopedia Magica was the one with the faux leather cover and the nifty silk style bookmark.
In terms of production value, it was incredible (one of the few 2e books that has never fallen apart on me compared to say Faiths & Avatars that fell apart after 1 year) and in terms of content, it blew the Magica Encyclopedia out of the water (now THERE was a useless product -- all it did was reference where you could find items and didn't even have all items).
EM had full descriptions of EVERY item ever created in TSR products at that time including Dungeon and Dragon!!
The EM on the other hand even though it used full colour recycled art actually went to the trouble to MATCH pictures with the category and the black and white art was seviceable in depicting specific items when appropriately described in the text.
Great product and I consider EM as one of the "essential" items for any 1e/2e DM playing group (and I've seen similar praise for it on dragonsfoot and r.g.f.d).
That said, it was a money loser in that I distinctly remember TSR officials mentioning that they lose money on each book sold since the quality of the book itself was way above average.
Conversely, the Spell Compendium actually made money but it's production value could not even come CLOSE to EM. Hell, even the paper quality of EM was at least a grade higher than the type found in typical TSR products of the time.
I can't completely agree, the binding on at least the first EM have cracked open on me, along with the pages in F&A falling out. The bookmarks were a nice touch, and I have some of them marking important pages, for example, the last volume has the ribbon at the start of the tables, because it's just too convenient not too put it anywhere else. And I'd say it's an excellent resource for any retro D&D game, all the stuff is compiled for convenience which is good for some settings if you don't have some of the suppliments (including material from a Spelljammer product that never went to print), there's a huge pile of stuff to pick from, there's the artifact power tables from the Book of Artifacts, and there's several random tables that let you make lots of custom stuff.
It's a shame that it was sold at a loss, but later WotC reprints were similar to the Spell Compendiums, IIRC. So while it didn't have those nice covers and book marks, it was still being printed.
I also liked that the Wizard's and Priest's Spell Compendiums kept the world references for spells, and noted the rarity of spells - that was great for helping to decide how often the PCs should come across the new spells in those books.
The spell rarity rules quickly became one of my standard house rules, and I continued to apply a simplified version of them them into 3e. Here's how I do it:
Common spells: Any spell from any edition of the PHB, except those superceded by new rules (eg:
friends from the 2e PHB is replaced by
eagle's splendor,
find familiar from the 2e PHB is dropped because it's a class skills for sorcs/wizards, the
extension spells are replaced by metamagic feats, etc).
Uncommon spells: spells from sources like 1e UA, 2e Tome of Magic/Wizards Handbook/Spells and Magic, 3e Defenders of the Faith/Tome and Blood/Complete Divine/Complete Arcane/etc. Also the spells from WotC web articles like the
Spellbook.
Rare spells: stuff from other splats or campaign specific material, generic spells that appear in products other than caster-based splats or major optional rules. Spells from WotC's
Far Corners of the World articles also fall here, and probably I'd include anything in Frostburn, Stormwrack, and Sandstorm.
Very Rare: anything else. Mostly stuff from Dragon and Dungeon, spells that are unique to a single spellbook, anything else I find on the web that looks good, etc.
