Recent content by Desdichado

Fair enough, I guess. I would not happily run it. I'd either quite, and tell them they're on their own, or I'd throw all kinds of interesting things at them anyway. I don't advocate for my preference, except at my own table. I'm happy to discuss my preferences and talk about them with anyone...

So, are you suggesting that if the players decided that they wanted to avoid all of the weirdness and go open a bakery in the quietest, least weird town in the Realm, that that'd be OK with you? You'd run that for them? This is part of the reason this issue, and many others like it, struggle...

I've always liked Eberron, but my biggest hurdle in running it has been its focus on themes that I'm not interested in pursuing. I've actually found that "remixing" Eberron to something that is Eberron-like but not exactly Eberron works better for me. That's largely true for every setting...

I think the "dilemma of the quantum ogre" makes more sense if a few points are considered. In spite of what sandbox cultists say, the Platonic ideal of a sandbox isn't a very good model for an RPG, and very few players really want to play that kind of game. Anything that isn't a Platonic ideal...

They might have had. There's plenty of stuff in the History of Middle-earth series, and I'm sorry I can't remember which volumes now, that suggest that their ears were leaf-shaped. My own personal pet peeve is the certain declaration that orcs are corrupted elves, when no such thing was ever...

That's extremely debatable.

Steel is the great equalizer. Orcs are like Neanderthals in being bigger, meaner (but admittedly probably not greener) than people, and yet, there are no Neanderthals today. Humans can last just fine against orcs, just like Romans lasted just fine against Gauls, while admitting that individual...

Frankly, I think that in order to fight dragons, except for exceptionally small ones, you should have some kind of fantasy ordinance, like ballistas with magical or blessed bolts or something like that, and large weighted nets to hamper its ability to fly, and otherwise a whole host of special...

I've got, I believe although I need to check, the entire 3e run of FR products. I'm not even all that excited about that, but certainly I have all of the FR material that I ever need right there. Even if I were to play a 5.5 version of 5e, I wouldn't need a 5.5 book on it. Setting stuff is...

No, I meant the "New Shield Lands", which is a small rump state of the original Shield Lands, and claims the rest of the territory once occupied by the "Old Shield Lands". Nentir Vale being a frontier territory in this area that Critwall would like to peacefully reincorporate makes perfect sense.

I also discovered just now after looking that they only published about 20-21 or so in the original US print run. The later titles never got US releases. So I guess I was more familiar with the full run for my region than I thought.

I don't run games in the Forgotten Realms, because I only ever really run games in my own homebrews, but I do have a strange love-hate but more love fondness for the Forgotten Realms, and I've recently embarked on a project to read (or re-read, for many) every single 3e Forgotten Realms product...

I never got out of the lower numbers, because by the time we were in the upper teens in terms of book titles, I was kind of moving on. I'd discovered the unfortunate but brilliant TolkienQuest books by then, and Lone Wolf, which were probably my last forays into gamebooks before I kind of moved...

1. Eberron: Near Yrlag. Kind of remote, on the borders of Droaam, the Eldeen Reaches, the Shadow Marches and even the Demon Wastes. Alternatively, near Stormwreck Bay on the other side of the Continent, where you can get Mror, Lhazaar, Talenta and Q'barra all involved. 2. Golarion: Somewhere...

You can summon them, you can ally with them, you can pit them against bad guys. But mostly, it's because Gygax was at heart a simulationist, and his "Gygaxian naturalism" as it's been called, meant that he had to have the rest of the world statted out, or at least an idea on how he would do it...