Recent content by JML

I've enjoyed these books quite a bit. Much stronger than the Sword Coast book from the early days of 5E and a better pair of books that the 4E Realms books as well. For someone like me who prefers gaming books in print, it's a bit of a bummer to know that most of the additional support for the...

seriously. it's really rare for him to have a dog, especially in the early years of his contributions to the magazine. Roger Moore's stuff was pretty consistently great as well, as was Jeff Grubb's. Not hard to see why TSR hired both Moore & Grubb and basically printed anything Greenwood wrote...

You're quite obsessed with declaring other people's opinions as "wrong" with you as being "right". Maybe the Forgotten Realms in a particular style is very important to you, but we've got over 35 years of publishing history that has been at various points contradictory. Beyond that, someone's...

I totally ran a Druid/Ranger. When I was playing 1E, Rangers were far and away my favorite class (not a surprise as a big LotR fan) and we played around with all kinds of mods. Immediately house-ruled it to allow elves to be Rangers, etc. I'd probably start the "best run" of Dragon a little...

Greenwood's Pages From the Mages articles have held up very nicely, and this kind of writing is one of the reasons the Forgotten realms became such a hit with many people. New spells were always fun, but the lore that was wrapped around them made for an interesting read and spawned ideas for how...

Guessing you're referring to the Jeff Easley covers of the Orange Spine version? Larry Elmore didn't do any AD&D 1E covers. I think all of the editions have merits and fun contained therein for those with the desire to find them. I started with B/X (which we also merged with AD&D 1E because we...

B/X D&D was first for me, which melded into AD&D (we were kids: Basic, Expert, then Advanced made a sort of sense to us and we shoveled it all together). Think Traveller would have been next? But once we made the leap to playing something other than D&D we tried everything we could get our hands...

There's a lot of fiction that haven't aged all that well or have problematic themes/scenes, along with knowing things about authors that can for many people color how they might view that author's work. Still happening today, as I'm sure people around here know quite well. It can be challenging...

I'm liking this iteration of Realms books quite a bit. I think the collection of adventure hooks for the regions and separated out by party level is a very useful tool, the maps are very nice, the gazetteers are solid, and there's a lot of good information packing in here. I do think it's...

One of the things that I found interesting about this book (and the DM focused one) was the lack of NPC's. There's no Rogue's Gallery in here, very little on any major figures in the Realms outside of brief notations on the rulers of varying realms. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing...

There's a specific reference regarding the gods and gender, basically a "while the gods may be represented by their followers as one gender, they're gods and are above needing such points of reference for themselves and can appear and be however they want..." I picked up the books (I'm a sucker...

It's a quality book and I'm quite pleased with it so far. I'm a sucker for a good world book and the realms has had many (in varying quality) over the course of it's published life and this is one of the better ones. I do find the subclasses to be a bit underwhelming; it's an unfortunate...

I think you miss the point. The wheels come off when people debt-finance a takeover of a modestly profitable company and the need to finance the debt means they can only do things they hope will be wildly profitable or sell off every part of the business to where they only have the bit that...

Disagree. the mandatory quests can help keep one player from running away with the game and add in an increased level of player interaction without being too detrimental. If anything should get popped out it's the Open Lord quest that makes one player immune to all mandatory quests. It's a...

Classic McKinsey/MBA-Bro/Vulture Capitalist thinking. "Yes, you're generating a profit, but it's not a BIG profit, so why bother?" The fact that it's giving people jobs, putting something creative out into the world, giving you enhancements to other parts of your company's products...why would...