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Thanks for the Thule love! My next fantasy setting? Hmm . . . I feel that we have not yet seen the definitive steampunk D&D setting yet. Eberron didn't quite hit that nail on the head for me. Naturally, I want to have a go at it and see if I can do steampunk better. I read Jim Butcher's 'The...

Hi, Luis -- First, your "broken English" is excellent! If you didn't say anything I would not have guessed you aren't a native speaker. Here are a couple of ideas you might explore for increasing the "magic is rare" element in Primeval Thule: * No cantrip attack spells; encourage the PC...

Mostly geographic -- I don't recall that we had any serious intent to draw on New World cultures for any parts of Aduria. (Maztica wasn't all that far in the rear view mirror back then, and we didn't regard it as anything we wanted to repeat.) Rich

I think that's about where we imagined them--Phoenicians or Carthaginians. We never put much down in writing about them AFAIK. If we had moved ahead with an Aduria sourcebook it would have been explored at more length, but since we didn't, it wasn't. Rich

Thanks, Orius! I had a lot of fun working on World Builder's. As it turns out I had a good mix of geography and history in my college days, so I was able to make good use of my interests to create random-generation systems that produced somewhat "realistic" results. I used to think of material...

Hi, Nicolas -- OK, the very short version, because it was 20 years ago and I no longer have any of the notes . . . Aduria was sort of South America-shaped with a Mediterranean in the middle, about where the Amazon basin would be. The northern shores near Cerilia were mostly barren desert...

Good suggestions. I have come to really appreciate the way the skill lists work in 4e and 5e as compared to 3e or Pathfinder (mostly because I am playing in a 3.5 game at home, and it drives me nuts that I don't have the skill points to be good at a group of closely associated things like...

No idea, Zed (may I call you Zed?) I think Wizards has little to lose by opening up more of the old worlds to fan development through the DM's Guild, but I am not part of the collective any more. Rich

Hi, Fergug -- I was actually pretty happy with 4e for Dark Sun. If there was anything that didn't go quite the way I wanted, I would have to say it was the implementation of defiling magic and preserving magic. We couldn't capture the idea that a defiler had a real edge over a preserver by...

Hi, Darjr -- Mostly it was about building a good random character gen system and fitting it into a tight space limit. We felt that the iconic Gamma World experience from back in the day was rolling on mutation tables with no idea what you would get. Also: Early in our design work we realized...

As you say, that's up to Wizards of the Coast. I'd be happy to help them do it if they decided to! Rich

Thanks, Jeff! Kind of you to say so. You know, the idea of just publishing a nice sandboxy adventure along the lines of Phandelver never crossed my mind. I've been looking at things like Primeval Thule adventures, but your idea definitely has merit. I'm going to think on that for a bit! Rich

Hi, Superchunk -- Good questions! Let me see what I can do with those . . . 1. As I noted earlier, Star*Drive was really part of Bill Slavicsek's original Alternity pitch to TSR management. I did add some bits just by being part of the team--for example, StarMech came into existence because I...

I don't think 2e was a bad fit for Birthright. The domain rules were a pretty independent module, and they could have been bolted on to almost any RPG. (In fact, the Pathfinder guys did that for their Kingmaker adventure path -- in spirit if not in mechanics, anyway.) If there is any place where...

Hi, Devilbass -- For some mechanical improvements, see the preceding post. I would also be interested in exploring some new setting ideas (mostly because things like Star*Drive and Dark*Matter belong to Wizards of the Coast, so I'd have to build new worlds of my own). My favorite things about...

Hi, Vicente -- I have thought about it. Like I said before, I was just batting around some ideas with Bill Slavicsek a few weeks ago. As far as improving or changing the game, hmm, let me see . . . I'd be inclined to tinker with the core mechanic to make rolling high good, I'd switch over to a...

Mhoried. I set a book there: "The Falcon and the Wolf." Rich

No, I didn't. My marching orders at the beginning of the Conquest of Nerath project were to "make a Forgotten Realms Axis & Allies, but set it on a nonspecific fantasy world and make it a unique game system." Which is kind of funny, when you think about it. There was a sense on the business team...

No relation to Vincent Baker. Nor to Keith Baker, for that matter. I'm afraid I haven't seen your DMs Guild material. (I am no longer actively writing in the Realms, and I am not part of the WotC effort to elevate good DMs Guild offerings to canon status.) Rich

Yes, we did. We developed a little bit of information about Aduria. I think some of that appeared in some old articles (you might find them over on birthright.net). There was also a wacky plan from Lorraine Williams--one day she came in after reading a book about Eleanor of Aquitaine, and she...