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31 is a sheriff's badge, 35 is suspiciously reminiscent of Michael Jackson's glove...

Mystara is a tricky one, because it evolved from a generic setting into a crazy freewheeling sort of thing with room for D&D-ized versions not just of various historical cultures, but of entire genres. On their way to becoming first rulers and then Immortals, PCs from a fantasy version of the...

Oh, man, those 1e rangers. :devil: In the last 1e campaign I ran, the table joke was that the ranger's steely glare was enough to make humanoids drop dead as the variety of humanoids he didn't even need to bother rolling damage against gradually increased. Combine the damage bonus with the...

Sounds like a job for Waldorf. Has anybody updated his stats to 5e yet?

Yeah, 5e has broadened the Paladin archetype quite a bit. The Oath of Devotion is pretty much the traditional LG paladin, but the Oath of Vengeance -- while written as "Good does not mean Nice" -- would suit a Blackguard after just a little retheming. And an Unseelie take on the Oath of the...

Like green slime back in the day! :D

Note that he doesn't need to marry anybody to do that -- Homer has him escorting the souls of the dead to the underworld, and historically, people were invoking Hermes for magical purposes by at least the 4th century BCE.

There's a teeny bit of evidence that there actually was a cult in Classical Athens dedicated to the belief that Athena would replace Zeus as the ruler of the gods, and bring in a new golden age. The transition was supposed to happen via Mother Earth revoking Zeus' kingship and putting Athena in...

Oops! :blush: Apologies, Ragmon, for giving you a flawed explanation, and thanks to nogray for the correction!

You mean these rules? You'd effectively sacrifice 8000 XP (reducing your XP total) to reduce the LA to +1, turning him into an ECL 8 character with 31043 XP, then another 7000 to get rid of the last point of LA, leaving him ECL 7 with 24043 XP. Then advancement will happen normally from there...

War chariots were a major factor in Bronze Age warfare in Mesopotamia and Egypt precisely because of the terrain. Then people in places like Anatolia and Greece saw that the military elite of those civilizations were all chariot archers and decided that chariots=prestige, never mind...

There aren't as many historical maps of cities online as I'd like, but the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection contains, among other things, scans of a 1911 historical atlas that includes plans of London c. 1300 (upper-right corner of a large JPG) and Rome c. 1200, plus a generic "Medieval...

Please accept my condolences, and allow me to wish you the best of luck finding saner people to game with.

I hadn't realized that the various Warhammer/40K RPGs were that big -- well, before last fall or so, I guess. It's also fascinating to see how different licensed-property games have waxed and waned in popularity. How much do we know about how the size of the overall industry changed over this...

New Years' festivals that involve divination or things you're supposed to do or avoid to ensure good luck for the coming year are fun to play with. Give the players a hint about what's ahead, and/or some temporary bonuses or penalties based on what they do during the festival. A lot of cultures...

IMHO, D&D has evolved into a genre unto itself that is so intertwined with the game rules that I don't see the rules adapting well to other genres. Some of the d20 games showed very clever design, but if class-and-level worked for everything, then most of the RPG industry would have never...

I wonder how much the disappointment is worth. I'd bet the party rogue will be able to find a buyer. ;) Oops! No, wait, that was a period rather than a comma after "disappointment." :)

True enough, but they also reprinted a bunch of old core books for the nostalgia market. So they have different strategies for print and PDF.

Druids have a long tradition of being more situationally useful than other classes -- they just aren't going to shine in all environments. But that said, giving Druidcraft free makes sense. And I could see giving starting clerics Thaumaturgy plus two cantrips of the player's choice, for the...

Yeah, they they categorize various other stuff as"Core Rulebooks", but the Rules Cyclopedia, Moldvay Basic and Cook Expert sets, and the Mentzer Basic Set are the only real core rules on DnDClassics. It must be a business decision to not sell core rules as PDF's, but I'd love to know the...