MCDM officially announces their RPG

[Eyes of Nine]

except for maybe the urban fantasy genre which does seem to owe a debt to Vampre the Masquerade (I doubt we get, say, the Underworld movies without Vampire for example).

Sidebar - I bet Sony's hush money (White Wolf and Underworld settled in 2003, money paid to the creators of VtM, including Steve Wieck) is what paid for the creation of DriveThru RPG (opened in 2004 by Steve Wieck (and a couple others))

 

[Mageman]

I cannot wait to get this when it comes out. I'm so glad someone is leaving 5e behind and trying something fresh

 

[Morrus]

I cannot wait to get this when it comes out. I'm so glad someone is leaving 5e behind and trying something fresh

There's so much fresh non-5E stuff out there!

 

[Bayushi_seikuro]

Right, but "originally" was only in its very early years, and it was quickly abandoned in actual practice.
That's like looking at the "Great Train Robbery" and thinking all movies are black & white and silent.

I agree. Now that I look back at my comment, I think that once D&D really got more 'far afield' and grew, it expanded more. Once it left Gygax's table, or perhaps even his writings, it really became more epic and cinematic.

If you look at the play example from the original AD&D DMG, where the party is exploring the monastery's cellars, I think the feel still is way more Lankhmar/Conan (the 1979 AD&D DMG, pg 97) I know things evolve, but Gygax wrote the example that doesn't feel particularly heroic or epic:

"Assuming that the abandoned monastery is merely a burned-out shell, with nothing but rubble and ruin within, the players spend only a few minutes of real time 'looking around' before they find a refuse-strewn flight of steep and worn stone stairs leading downward. 'Ahah!', exclaims the leader of the group. 'This must be the entrance to the dungeons. We'll find what we are looking for there.'"

Again, I know there's no way more 'correct' or 'true' way to play D&D, and I agree with your idea that as the game met more players and more people became involved it grew and changed, but I'd say there's probably a decent sized non-zero percent of people who feel the 'Gygax way' and the onerous amount of bookkeeping and adverserial DMing is the right way.

 

[Bayushi_seikuro]

There's so much fresh non-5E stuff out there!

Heck, there's a ton of not-even-close-to-fresh stuff out there to try. As it stands, I wrestle with what I want to run a game in and I wonder if the question isn't what system fits the story better as much as what system will be easiest to play online with friends.

 

[DarkCrisis]

Glad he’s living true dream. Ill Be curious to see what his fantasy rpg separates it from all the other fantasy RPGs out there.

 

[CubicsRube]

Has there been any word on the magic system and spells yet? I'm tried of the D&D tropes of fireballs and magic missiles and the like. I'd like to see some creativity and diversity in this space.

 

[Autumnal]

Epics, epics…let see what’s on my shelf. I don’t really like all of these, it some of my all-time faves are in here and others are wildly popular with people I consider at least as worth heeding as me.

Fiction:
The Dune series
Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey & Maturin series
Bernard Cornwall’s Sharpe series
Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon The Deep and A Deepness Across The Sky
multiple series by Peter Hamilton
Dan Abnett’s Gaunt and Inquisitor series, Warhammer 40K
The Horus Heresy, by approximately everybody, also 40K
Gregory Benford, Galactic Center series
Olaf Stapledon, Last And First Men and Star Maker - in all seriousness, I can’t think of anything on the scale of Star Maker, and yes, I’m including Tolkien‘s unpublished work in that.

Non-fiction:
Edward Gibbons, The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire
John McPhee, Annals Of The Former World
Peter Ackroyd’s history of England
Joseph Needham’s history of Chinese science and technology

No shortage of epics outside of fantasy, I’m thinking.

 

[The Shadow]

Olaf Stapledon, Last And First Men and Star Maker - in all seriousness, I can’t think of anything on the scale of Star Maker, and yes, I’m including Tolkien‘s unpublished work in that.

As an author friend of mine likes to say, a page of Star Maker is like a novel for anyone else. Stapledon's writing was not the greatest, but he's pretty much unparalleled for sheer inventiveness!

EDIT: I will say that John C. Wright's Eschaton Sequence, though longer, is on a similarly staggering scale. And has a much more satisfying ending!

 

[Autumnal]

Your author friend was really right. I’ve only read a little Wright, but he’s become a far right wing zealot sort of a Christian and has wants me and a bunch of my friends to suffer and die, so I figure he can go get readers elsewhere.

Edited to add: several of my closest friends and a bunch of my colleagues are Christians who make their beliefs look good and make the world a better place. This isn’t Wright being a Christian but about him committing to being a bad person, as some people do in every worldview.