Recent content by Marandahir

I regret not getting the box set in 2012!!! I got the other premium reprints for 1E and 2E, but OD&D I missed out on. :(

To be fair to Tolkien, it's how fantasy writers who are called Tolkien work, too. Yes, he had the Book of Lost Tales and Elvish philologies and mythologies to draw on, but he didn't INTEND to draw on those and really the Middle-earth we know and love from the four non-posthumously published...

Winter Walker is a tie in to Icewind Dale, not to the Dalelands.

I'd note that as a MacOS User, the switch to Silverlight actually allowed me to use the D&D Insider toolset, rather than paying for just the Magazine Articles. The original version of the Tools was Windows exclusive. D&D Beyond is far superior a tool now than that was back then, and in many...

I've traditionally used grid or hexgrid software with Pogs for characters & NPCs, when playing over internet. In real life, I have battle mats (both grid and hexgrid) and generic wooden figurines and pieces given that I have no desire to get into the miniatures market. Hexgrid is preferable...

I tend to have "Circus Troupe" parties in my games, but that's partly because my setting is a bit kitchen-sinky and tends to have Mos Eisley Chalmun's Cantina-esque locations in many big cities and even in smaller port towns, even though my setting has a lot of multi-directional fantasy racism...

Deck of Many Things may be throwing off Misc very slightly -- it's actually a Rules Expansion book akin to Bigby's and Fizban's.

This is the sort of Collector's Reference work I try to create for every franchise/property/medium/genre/story/characters I collect from. And it's a useful reference tool for when someone asks what other sources they may want to explore to learn more about a particular thing. I'd love to...

In many ways, Warlock shows how "half-casters" probably should have worked otherwise. During OneD&D, WotC experimented with removing Mystic Arcanum and spreading Warlock Spell levels 1-5 across all 20 levels akin to Artificer, Paladin, & Ranger. But if anything, Warlock shows how you can...

My great-aunt wrote about her great-grandfather's obsession with Pike's Peak. I wish I had had more conversations with her before she passed a few years ago. One day I'll go there myself.

It's beautiful and an easy on/off from the Mass Pike right after entering the state from CT Rt 84.

You're welcome! I had to do a bit of digging in my old 4E magazines archive (I don't think I've touched it much since 2014 when I last overhauled its structure, but this is the sort of ocassion I love that I spent so much time making sure I didn't lose a single article when we got warning that...

My fave coffee shop in Queens has been steadily increasing in price in the 3 years I've been visiting. It's gotten to the point that if I guess a large latte, a cortado, and a croissant sandwich, it's costing me over $30. This isn't just that coffee shop. It's prices across the board are...

This is also just a fun reference to 4e's Eladrin in Sarifal – Llewyrr Elves were an ancestry of Eladrin, rather than of Elf, because Eladrin had killed the High Elf and taken its stuff (it got better). See Dragon No. 376 "Realmslore: Sarifal" (June 2009); see also Dragon No. 405 "Character...

I'm wondering if the Lorwyn supplement started as a Moonshae Isles supplement and Llewyrr looked so silmilar to Lorwyn that someone at corporate said – wait no, we're doing a Lorwyn magic set in January, make this a Lorwyn thing. I was glad that we got actual mechanical ancestries for Lorwyn...