Recent content by Paul Farquhar

But only wizards can ritual cast it without preparing it. So characters who are not wizards don’t tend to have it. Clerics sulk over having to prep it if there is no wizard in the party. You can get choose them as rewards for completing the quests. But that wasn’t my point. My point was that a...

Have your read Keys from the Golden Vault? You are going to want to focus on out of combat stuff if you are playing that. Very few indicate that there are no scroll vendors. Just like they don't indicate that their are no brothels. There are a great many things that are not included in the...

That depends on what style game is being played. The “best ones” depends on the situation. The DM suddenly announces they will be running a heist from Keys from the Golden Vault. The sorcerer's combat focused loadout isn't going to be much use. The wizard can prep relevant spells (buying...

You can put anything in or out of any setting if you want to. The qualification is meaningless. The point is there is no “setting integrity” justification for not letting players play whatever they want.

If it looks like a book and quacks like a book?

Perhaps more likely: Strahd’s Book of Forbidden Magic. Not specifically Ravenloft (Fizban’s book wasn’t specifically Dragonlance) but including the sort of stuff you might find there, such as necromancers and reanimators, along with misc other things that need updating. Thereby Ravenloft is...

We already know, because it was established in earlier editions, and restated in 5e, that Mordy is a Doctor Strange cosplayer, not a Gandalf cosplayer. Elminster and Fizban are the Gandalf cosplayers. But, if you wanted to reference CoS Mordy, you would put in a stag, since that’s the form he...

Yeah it does. He is busy being a stag. Apart from the ones that aren’t.

Which the wizard definitely does not. Nor any other depiction or Mordy. And there are other things in the picture that do not relate to CoS. If the card is a hint, rather than just an artist’s doodle, then we might deduce that the wizard is a reference to a different upcoming product.

I do think the complaining about this is another example of the entitlement mentality. People seem to think they have a right to know.

What I find interesting is what I didn't learn at primary school. For example, I didn't hear of Beowulf until I was well into being an adult. Rosemary Sutcliff wrote a children's translation in 1956 but I never came across it when I was of school age. And local fairy and folk tales generally, I...

Certainly Fizban is pretty much indistinguishable from Gandalf, but I'm more inclined to say it's a representation of a PC wizard. The party may even represent PCs in the artist's own game.

Primary school. Aside from the regular Greek and Norse stuff I remember doing a compression on Baba Yaga, and reading the end of Robin Hood (the bit where he is poisoned by the abbess) in class. I also picked up some stuff on the BBC. I remember David Attenborough did a show for children’s TV...

UK now. And has been since I was at school myself. Primary teaching is largely based around topics. So they do Knights and Castles, the Ancient Egyptians, Vikings etc as well as myths.

Its used to as a vehicle to teach language skills and history. They also do Norse myths.