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So? If the half-orc isn't popular, why the hell should Wizards of the Coast waste paper and ink on printing it? That's a poor example, since I'm sure the half-orc will be properly dealt with by the time Eberron rolls around. But it does extend to anything else you can imagine.

You're wrong. The new "core" will be each year's iteration of the Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual. Other sourcebooks aren't necessarily counted as "core".

We know they're going to publish compilations of D&D Insider material in book form from time to time, so this is absolutely no more problematic than the fact that the ninja class in Complete Adventurer first showed up in Dragon.

I'm not too concerned about half-orcs showing up first in D&D Insider, as long as they're properly provided for when Eberron rolls around.

Incubi and succubi, for one. You know Merlin, in the traditional stories, had magical abilities because his father was an incubus who impregnated his human mother? More classic than Tolkien!

My preferred solution would be for multiple Fourth Edition designers to take a stab at drawing up maps for the implied setting if they feel the need, and for Wizards of the Coast to whack them up on the website. I don't want a map in the core rules - that's going too far towards establishing a...

I can think of a few. Revenants which live again only long enough to take revenge for some crime against them in life, heroes resurrected but somehow changed by the gods to fulfill a series of tasks before they're granted their rest, proper incorporeal "ghosts" (as opposed to the solid...

What about the option you missed, Jan - dead PCs are able to continue adventuring with the rest of the party somehow? That's pretty much how Ghostwalk did it.

I was under the impression that those adventures were packaged in a folio with maps and booklets, or something.

I had subscribed to Dragon for a few years and to Dungeon for the Savage Tide adventure path when the magazines were cancelled, and I'm interested in D&D Insider.

It's possible that animate dead will be considered less problematic because it's a) premeditated (you can't just call up a zombie on the fly in combat), b) long-term (you're not summoning a creature for a couple of rounds), and c) easily limited to a few creatures (unlike a summoner who can...

You'll have to pay up, then, because I came into the game in 1990, right at the beginning of the Second Edition era, and I had never even heard of the Forgotten Realms until I started picking up Dragon several years later. The only setting-specific material in the Second Edition rulebooks is...

It's not Wizards of the Coast's fault that you've encountered a lot of arbitrarily dickish DMs, though.

No. There will be rules for playing gnomes in the Monster Manual. I'll bet you $10. What Rich Baker is talking about is a full Player's Handbook racial writeup on the order of the one previewed for elves a few weeks ago. I imagine the rules for PC gnomes in the Monster Manual will be the...

I'm with Clive Cussler, though obviously he was a little optimistic. ;)

I think it makes perfect sense that Wizards of the Coast would want to establish their IP as quite distinct from that of the Tolkien Estate or New Line Cinema.

Did you mean einherjar or einheriar?

Damn it, man, I think I love you.

I don't tend to believe that Tolkien was deliberate in his classism. I think it was something quite ingrained in him, as a privileged British academic who grew up in the first half of the 20th century. Heh. Are you saying they don't? ;)

A class-stratified, idealised "vanished England" that ignores the hard work that the exploited "common people" Tolkien casually patronises in the figure of Sam and others had to do to keep "gentlemen" like Frodo in the comfort to which they considered themselves entitled. ;)