Search results

For someone interested in learning more about Greyhawk, and seeing that a lot of the old books are pretty dang expensive, are the 3e era Gazetteers (The D&D Gazetteer and the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer) an adequate introduction to the setting?

In practice, most of those restrictions didn't actually restrict things very much. The highest level of spells a divine caster could cast being affected by the rank of the deity they served? It would only come into play in a game where Clerics would be able to cast 6th level spells. In...

From the 2nd Edition Player's Handbook Thus the example you gave would require 70 minutes to memorize, not 8 hours. Long memorization times was even a plot point in Dragonlance, it's why the Towers of High Sorcery fell. . .they were under constant attack and the amount of time it would take a...

When people talk about a D&D setting being "high magic" or "low magic" I think they're referring to how often magic is typically encountered in the everyday life of the setting. In Eberron, they've got magically powered railroads, airships flying taxis, magically augmented skyscrapers, a PC...

Yes. When they made official D&D stats for Conan, back in 1st Edition for some officially licensed Conan products, they made him a multiclassed Barbarian/Thief.

Then there are the novels where it's not subtext, it's text. When I was in college, I had a roommate that was fanatical about Piers Anthony, and said I'd love it if I read his works. He gave me one to start out on. Firefly. Yes, that one. For those that don't know, it's a modern day...

It's not that it's unique, per se, it's that it was the first. The various settings it seems like? They were ripping off it, not the other way around. Greyhawk suffers from the fact that it's been poorly marketed for 30+ years. It was always so intrinsically tied to Gary Gygax that once he...

I can tell you that in the mid 90's in rural Kentucky, Beowulf and Canterbury Tales were standard works for Senior-year High School English class. We had to read them in the original dialects instead of translated (albeit with generous translation notes provided for many words and terms)...

I always thought it was clear that Vance was used as the seed material for magic in D&D not because it was an especially popular or influential book series, but because the magic in it was well suited to being converted to a tabletop RPG. A system where wizards could only cast a fixed, well...

They tried that, it was called the Spellplague. Was rather controversial, turned a lot of fans off the setting. Pretty much every serious Realms fan I know ignores it or at best focuses on stuff from before it.

2e Player's Option had a mixed response, I wouldn't say it was received poorly by the community as a whole. In the late 90's, when I was first starting to play, almost every group I played with used Player's Option rules. There were definitely groups that didn't, and some people who felt very...

The D&D bard, to the best of my knowledge, is based on the following: The Celtic Bard, as a musician/performer and master of lore, the 2e PHB specifically cited Amergin Glúingel from Irish folklore as an inspiration for the Bard class. The 2e AD&D PHB also cited Alan-a-Dale and Will Scarlett of...

The statue of Kraagor goes all the way back to Shojo's "crayons" exposition to the Order. It can be seen in a panel in Comic #276. This one goes WAY back. https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0276.html

Yeah, that was kinda the idea, that a class (Warlock) and a race (Dragonborn) that in 3.x were closed, are now OGC, and an translation based on the 5e OGC should be possible.

When the Warlock class first debuted in D&D, it was in the Complete Arcane supplement for D&D 3.5, in November 2004. It wasn't OGC, and quite honestly was rather awkward and kludging, trying to create an arcane caster class that couldn't cast spells and instead just got nothing but spell-like...

Yeah, the idea that somehow the Gods of the Forgotten Realms care one bit about balance is nonsense. I'm pretty dang sure that Helm and Tyr and Lathander would scour Faerun of all evil if they could. . .and that Bane and Beshaba and Loviatar would kill every good-aligned God and torture and...

Gods being able to die is a thing in the real world too. Both Egyptian, Norse and Greco-Roman mythologies certainly have the idea of Gods being able to die or of Gods being able to kill each other. Also, the concept of an Overpower isn't exclusive to FR in D&D. Dragonlance has the Highgod...

The 2e spell compendiums are the 2e sourcebooks I still use the most. I'll sometimes go to an old Realms book for some lore, or some book for setting material, but the only "crunch" books from the AD&D era I go to are those. Yeah, you have to convert and update them to fit them into 3.x (or...

Tarokka Cards have been a D&D prop since Ravenloft was a separate campaign setting in the 1990's. I vaguely recall one issue of Dragon in the 90's having a cardboard insert of Tarokka Cards to punch out. They also did a Deck of Many Things as a card insert at one point. Do you need them for...

I was just thinking the other day that TSR's website was www.tsrinc.com . . .and wondering what kind of company actually put an "inc" at the end of their domain name. Nowadays it's unthinkable unless that "inc" is really a key part of their brand, even in the 90's it was stuffy and uptight...