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Basically, the big bad of the setting. Inventor of sorcery. Created the sorcerer kings in order to genocide all other races so that halflings can regain their position of primacy and bring back another paradisial Blue Age. They now the sorcerer kings worked out he intended to genocide them and...

As is fairly clear from the sheer volume of my word vomit on the subject, I DO love the DS backstory even though I believe it was often poorly used and inadequately thought out, but I fully intend to run ‘the Rajaat campaign’ at some point and so I think about this stuff. It’s not necessarily...

Yep. Your resolution is actually really nicely poetic in a lot of ways and I do like it. The devil would be in the buildup though. If the PCs are fighting Borys - why are they doing it? How much do they know about Rajaat at this time? Have they decided to fight Borys on the assumption that...

Yeah, it makes entire in-world sense, and i like the extra wrinkle of Borys's paranoia having him keep up the pretence all that time. Would it work as a scenario in game though? It's a bit 'little man behind the curtain'. It might be a letdown to the players if you've hyped up Rajaat all...

I’ve thought a lot about how to handle Rajaat in a hypothetical rerun of the Prism Pentad with PC heroes. If killing a returned Rajaat was that easy, Borys would have done it centuries ago. In the books it’s only managed by a complete deus ex machina which would not only be very hard to emulate...

Pre-Cerulean Storm, there was a nice balance-of-terror/mutually-assured-destruciton dynamic between the sorcerer-kings that I actually appreciate. All of them watched Borys become a dragon, all of them watched him run wild with agonised murderous insanity for a hundred years in the process...

Argh, yes, typo fixed...

Oh god yes. The first couple of years of Dark Sun releases were like the absolute platonic ideal of How Not To Build A Gameline. You have the novels overturning and obsoleting the entire setting almost immediately after it came out, and adventure modules where the PCs get to meekly follow in...

I’d push back a little on this idea that defiling was written as consequences-free. The problem was that mechanically the consequences were that a significant chunk of land around you was sucked dry and the earth was basically salted, in a radius depending on the spell level, the fertility of...

To be fair, in The Verdant Passage novel, which I’m fairly sure was the second ever Dark Sun product after the original box (correct me if I’m wrong), Sadira is written as nominally a preserver, but one who lapses into defiling at times of stress, desperation etc. Even TSR, that early in the...

Something that just occurs to me - Paizo copped merry hell a couple of years ago over the Agents of Edgewatch AP. Having a campaign centred around 'good guy' law enforcement PCs was seen as distinctly smelly give the political events around BLM etc that were happening at the time. Paizo...

Quick n easy 5.x defiling rules. When casting an arcane spell you (not you, sorcerer-king pact warlocks…) can choose to defile or preserve. If you choose to defile, cast as normal. If you choose to preserve, make a concentration check, DC=8+ spell level, advantage if you’re in a particularly...

I’m in a weird spot with this in that I’m cautiously optimistic from a big picture point of view while disliking a large amount of what is presented. Druid subclass is mechanically interesting but thematically misses the point completely. What’s the point of ‘preserving’ a temporarily verdant...

Without analysing it TOO deeply, that's a pretty solid starting list. The only really obvious ones I can see missing are: The Buried Dagger. Not a particularly good book, but it has Mortarion's ascension to daemonhood in it (spoiler alert!), so you might want to read it for completeness...

Yeah, there’s definitely some duds or nothing books along the way. Eisenstein, Nemesis, the two early Dark Angels books, the Salamanders mini-arc culminating in Deathfire, Battle for the Abyss, Fear to Tread, just to name a few. Even End And The Death parts 2 and 3 didn’t really work for me...

That’s a pretty fair point of view. I’ve got mixed feelings about the implementation of power stunts in m&m in general, to be fair. It’s such a core element of the genre that you absolutely need to have them, but they can be a bit cheap and routine in practice. I’ve seen (not played in) games...

Yeah, that’s been similar to my experience too. M&M is mostly pretty quick in play (there are pain points, like recalculating everything after getting hit with a Weaken, or trying to manage a speedster on a battle map if that’s your jam, or sitting around twiddling thumbs while someone tries to...

I'm not really going to base my opinion on the developer, personally. Not everyone 'gets' the Realms in a way that I envision them or that works for me. I mean, I love Rich Baker's Eberron stuff, but his fingerprints (and Wyatt's) were all over the catastrophically bad 4th ed FR lore changes...

Hmm, even having the grid at all i think is a bit of a relic of D&D3e that's best moved past in the case of M&M. Super fights should be kinetic, not based around fiddly accounting for individual squares/hexes/spaces of movement to minimise attacks of opportunity etc. I'm not sure how you DO...

True, but there is such think as degrees of change. I don’t think many M&M fans want to see it transition to a completely narrative diceless system or anything like that, but there’s still probably scope for simplification while keeping the system recognisable. I mean, if anything the Valiant...