Recent content by Staffan

50%? The only ones I'd count as somewhat weird are: Bredbeddle, Olothec, Time raider, Valok, Voiceless talker, Wardogs, and Xorannox the Tyract. And many of those have direct counterparts in D&D: olothec are aboleths, voiceless talkers are mind flayers, and Xorannox is a named overmind which is...

Are e.g. time raiders more weird than e.g. githyanki? Or are you just more familiar with githyanki since they've been in D&D since the 80s (or whenever Fiend Folio was released)? Orden is at its core a pretty traditional vanilla fantasyland. On the periphery there's some weird stuff, but that's...

Clerics had major access to their elemental sphere and minor access to Cosmos (which was the "everything else" sphere). Druids had major access to their elemental sphere and to Cosmos. If their guarded land could justify it (e.g. a volcanic hot spring) they could also have minor access to a...

Create water definitely existed in 2e, as a 1st level spell conjuring 4 gallons/level. Dark Sun modified the spell to only conjure half a gallon per level, and it was only available to priests with access to the sphere of Water (which meant clerics of Water, druids whose guarded land was...

It's got a more-or-less medieval tech level, with elves and humans and dwarves and hobbitspolders and castles and knights and towns and dungeons. If your definition of "generic fantasy" is "Greyhawk with a slightly different map", it's not that, but it's pretty close. And the monster book is...

Hyperspecific? Orden is pretty vanilla fantasyland. There is some fantasy space stuff, but that's all out on the periphery of the setting, much like the planes are in D&D. It would take some effort to use most D&D settings with Draw Steel, but that's because those settings are specific in...

I think we have different definitions of "branches". A branch is what happens when things start developing along different pathways. So you have the root of OD&D, and from there you have two main branches: the "Basic" branch (1st, 2nd, and 3rd version followed by the Rules Cyclopedia) and the...

I'm not super fond of that list because it intermingles branches. Including Basic D&D/Rules Cyclopedia is like calling your uncle an ancestor.

I think the major complaint with the marketing was that there was a fair bit of it surrounding the original kickstarter, but that in the period following it most of the communication about the game seems to have been via Patreon which, by its very nature, is preaching to the converted. In...

If I were in charge of the game side of D&D, I would have started thinking about 6e back in early 2014. It probably wouldn't be much more than a folder with loose ideas though.

Don't forget Kof, who's a bit of a traditionalist and likes to put the family name first.

Preservers in the old lore were not necessarily eco-warriors (those were the druids and, to a lesser extent, clerics). Rather, they were pragmatists who see value in managing the extraction of resources (life energy). Don't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, as it were.

Athas started out being as green and verdant as any other setting (well, there was the Blue Age before that when it was almost entirely covered in water, but after that). Rampant defiling, particularly in the course of a series of genocidal wars, was what turned Athas into what it is today...

Gigantic (20 ft+) sentinels are a staple of X-Men and have been forever. On occasion, you get human-sized ones like the Prime Sentinels or bighuman like Nimrod (both the original one from the Days of Future Past timeline and the modern Orchis-made one from the Krakoa stuff), but "gigantic" is...

I think it comes from Chainmail wizards basically being fantasy versions of artillery.