Recent content by QuentinGeorge

War of Souls was always a bit schizophrenic on acknowledging non W/H contributions to the canon. It acknowledged most of the Fifth Age stuff for instance, but made some howling errors while doing so (According to DoaFS Palin Majere never led the White Robes? According to prior material. not only...

Yes, and with Ravenloft most of the flavour and leveraging of mechanics has been removed making it the most vanilla Ravenloft ever released.

Definitely something changed in how they treated settings, particularly in their fidelity to what came before: what Sword Coast, Eberron and Saltmarsh shared was they didn't go out of their way to overturn the existing history of a setting. With Ravenloft they sort of went hell-bent into "who...

My non-human species are so small in number and concentrated mostly in specific areas that they don't have a big variety of culture and language. Dwarves wandering human realms would speak the language of the land they come from, of course.

The big problem for that is that D&D's elves don't all worship the same gods (and some, in Eberron, don't worship any gods). At least until all this multiverse guff started to be pushed by the powers that be.

It's not difficult, and actually 5E is easier to modify than previous editions, but plainly WotC doesn't want to nor do they think they should. It's vanilla D&D, all the way down.

The vast majority of Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit takes place in what was once the kingdoms of Gondor/Arnor so that makes sense though.

Who on earth thought an adventure needed a dozen people writing it! Astounding.

I appreciated the flavour of a lot of those adventures (and that really is the strength of the collection) but some of those adventures are plain bad.

I'd be hesitant in calling Quests from the Infinite staiircase a straight up reprint. Yawning portal - definitely, but Infinite Staircase is following the more recent WoTC practice of changing quite a significant amount of things in their reprints. They added in antagonist in the Barrier Peaks...

Yeah, I really don't get it, people thinking making up gods and religions for their setting is not "too much work", but languages are? (You can actually run D&D without defining any gods - I also think D&D's focus on "gods" rather than religion is wrongheaded)

A more immersive experience, a sense of verisimilitude, a piece of wordlbuilding that doesn't offend my intellectual sensibilities, an actual reason for languages to exist in D&D at all? Do I need to go on? Every time I mention this people go into some sort of hysterical paroxysm thinking that...

D&D handles languages terribly so I completely throw it out for my games, including the ludicrous "common".

"The Styes" in Ghosts of Saltmarsh is a 3E adventure from Dungeon #121. The "juvenile kraken" in Ghosts of Saltmarsh is identical to a differently labelled picture in that Dungeon magazine. adventure