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Huh. We found that to be the craziest part of the ruleset. (Tangent alert):Thinking about it, though, there is one Holmes-specific thing that I do love, and that's the five alignments. The best alignment system of any version of the game, in my opinion.

Just curious: what Holmes-specific stuff were you still using at that point? My group has been playing a to-the-letter Holmes game of late, and we've decided that it's a mess, and frankly not all that glorious. B/X seems to take everything that Holmes should have been and make it playable.

Reviews matter, and and I wish there were more of them. John Cooper is by far my favorite, and I also like trancejeremy's and MerricB's reviews quite a bit. I agree that the star system is not terribly useful. I think it needs to be finer-grained (half-stars, perhaps), and there is indeed...

Burning pants has been one of our favorite 1st-level spells for years.

I've played Dire Spirits and a homebrew adventure, and am about to embark on a more extended Nyambe-based campaign (the party will be composed of standard PH races and classes who are exploring Nyambe). Thus far, I have really loved the flavor and the new monsters (although the statblocks may...

This is a great idea, even for a standard Nyambe game. I may just use this myself.

I'll leave the legal stuff to others, but I can tell you that at least as presented, Nyambe isn't pulpy, nor does it have a particularly unique take on magic. There's some slightly different background material -- n'anga clerics worship orisha rather than gods, and mchawi wizards steal arcane...

Ancestral Vault is the second and unfortunately final supplement for the brilliant African-themed Nyambe campaign setting, written by Chris Dolunt and Chris Jones. The book focuses on equipment and magic items, but also introduces a few feats, spells, and other game mechanics. It is a 96-page...

The Year's Best d20, Vol. 1 is 96-page perfect-bound softcover book published by Malhavoc Press, retailing for $20. It's a compilation of open content d20 material published in 2004, selected by Monte Cook, who is of course one of the co-creators of the d20 system. There is no overarching...

Nyambe does have gnolls: the mBui, and they're listed right in the monster chapter. They get their own homeland, too, and they don't worship Yeenoghu. To be fair, the setting doesn't do a lot of innovative stuff with them, but it does give them a short backstory that differs from the usual d20...

I've asked custserv if they plan to release errata. The answer is "not at this time." There are a number of errors in the new monster chapter, especially the zombie dragon, which is a complete mess. The BABs for all the sample black, blue, brass, and bronze dragons are screwed up, too...

Thanks, I didn't think so. But the 3.0 MM and MM2 are just full of creatures with iterative slam attacks: elementals, shield guardians, corpse gatherers, runic guardians, weirds, tempests, maybe more. It's consistent enough that it almost seems like an exception to the general rule about...

In 3.0, it appears that creatures with a single slam attack (e.g., Huge earth elementals) get iterative attacks due to a high BAB. As far as I can tell, this is the only case where a natural weapon gets an iterative attack, and it's applied pretty consistently. But I can't find anything in the...

For what it's worth, I stand by my three star rating of Toolbox. There's a lot of really fun stuff in there, and a lot of worthless stuff, especially those encounter tables. If you're a stat block stickler, you'll go insane. I didn't review Seas of Blood, but it's pretty decent. The Traps &...

Well, in the second issue, there's an implication that the battle was a little harder than this. Angel thinks to himself: "Tirgu Hateg [the Romanian village where the story is taking place] wasn't hit as hard as some. Santa Monica, for instance. That place is hurting. No place completely...

The text under "Creating a Zombie Dragon" is pretty unambiguous, but I'd actually be inclined to leave the frightful presence in. For one, skeletal dragons explicitly retain the ability, and I can't see a reason why one would have it and not the other. And second, the zombie dragon entry...

Why review a four year-old book, particularly one with more than a half-dozen reviews already? For one thing, the existing reviews are all rather short and lacking depth. But I think it also might be valuable to look back at some of the earlier d20 products from a more current perspective. We...

I used it as the motivator behind an entire campaign. Years ago, an evil, fiend-consorting wizard had the Deck, but her innocent six year-old daughter inadvertently got into it. The daughter drew the Skull, and was immediately slain, of course. Said wizard, having later become a vampire...

With my too-hot Jonathan Levenson avatar, I'm already fighting them off with a stick. I'll test your theory, though.

I don't know that it really ever had great promise, or that I was especially eager to see it, but Monsters of Faerun was a severe disappointment, even if you give it a pass because it was such an early book. It's full of wonky 2e-style mechanics, bizarre and clumsy flavor text, crazy CRs, and...