Recent content by Werthead

The way to grokk the Red setting is that it's "New York in the 1970s" but taken to extremes (as usual). As famously said in Brooklyn Nine Nine, "New York in the Seventies was basically The Purge." New York was rich in the 1950s, it started getting rich again in the 1980s, but inbetween things...

Mothership. Detached eyeballs. Severed leg. Fun!

I think it's almost an easier question so say what TTRPGs don't have amazing art these days. Traveller needs a nod, for a game infamous for having minimalist, black-and-white drawings for the longest time, the current edition of full-colour, beautiful, epic imagery is crazy. The art's so good...

Been playing a lot of STALKER 2 this week and that feels ready-made for a TTRPG conversion. Given the immense success of the series (this is the fourth game in the series, despite the name) and of TTRPGs in eastern Europe, and the ongoing popularity of Stalker the movie and Roadside Picnic the...

Thanks for that, just ordered a bunch of books as well. Good job.

The Forgotten Realms first appeared in print in Dragon way back in the late 1970s. The first canonical mention of Waterdeep and Thay is in 1982 and the first mention of Baldur's Gate is in 1984, all long before Kara-Tur appeared in Oriental Adventures in 1985 and before it was formally added to...

I think Greyhawk occupies an interesting niche where it has a large but not insanely large landmass, a fair amount of detail but not an incredible amount, and a reasonable amount of sourcebooks, boxed sets and adventures but not hundreds. There are a few Greyhawk novels and video games but not...

They've been pushing that more recently with Selûne, perhaps aware that having the most prominent D&D goddesses being Tiamat, Lolth and Shar, all being evil, and Mystra, who's been kind of on a yo-yo of being dead, alive, or stuck inside a bear for about 30 years (and is either neutral or good...

Blackmoor was certainly created first, but then you could argue Forgotten Realms predates either (created 1966) and then get into a discussion about Lankhmar (created 1939) because it was later a D&D campaign setting (though so was Conan, for two adventures only), though obviously not the...

The OG 1E adventure series was a big headache. The 15th Anniversary Edition for 2E was quite good, and had more coverage for how to run the adventures with homebrewed PCs, even ones quite different to the assumed. Because it was just one book I think they pruned some of the material. I am...

Weis & Hickman are still paid a licence for every copy sold of even the OG 1984-86 trilogy, it's just pretty risible compared to the normal market rate. For all new copies sold of their later DL books (Summer Flame onwards) they get much more the normal market rate, it's how TSR got them to...

The FR Wiki approach collates all previously-established lore into one location, which is handy for players and creatives alike (and if you're telling me that people working on 5E have never used FR Wiki to look something up, I have a bridge to sell you), whilst not contradicting the ethos that...

WotC have taken different views over canonicity over time, since WotC isn't a single entity but many, of varied backgrounds, and the person making the decisions now isn't necessarily the same person as 15 years ago, let alone 24. You can see that in 3E when they shrank Faerun in FR in size by...

The contents page always amused me as there is no rhyme or reason to the nomenclature: Campaign Setting Name. World Name. Campaign Setting Name. Name of one of the continents in the setting. World and Campaign Setting Name. And Dark Sun is something they're not even going to mention because...

Oerth is the central planet of its system, with the Sun orbiting it. Mystara is a hollow planet with tunnels at the poles linking to an "internal" planet with a microstar in the core. In 5E they did blow up Dark Sun altogether, leaving behind a devastated hellscape orbiting a black hole, but...