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Returning to minutiae, AD&D spells are a rich source of strangeness. The Faerie Fire spell has an area effect expressed in "linear feet". The short example in the text tells you that the druid spends this AOE outlining creatures, so at first level, with 12 linear feet, you can outline one 6'...

Just gotta say, I really enjoyed the article. Very thoughtful and though-provoking. I think over the past 50 years the whole concept of "level design" has matured a lot, and some design principals that were almost unheard of in the 80's have now become common practice in video games. For example...

Is that Mr. Nimbus for the sea druid? Can my PC control the police?

I recently finished reading the Planescape books. I thought they were really good, but they didn't spend much time on the outer planes. I have some quibbles: 1. The transition from Ysgard to Limbo is too abrupt. Vikings, then pure unformed Chaos? I get that all those CN PCs need a place to go...

I completely agree and have also completely given up. Spell slots are the One Mechanic To Rule Them All. Easy to balance the classes this way, at the cost of making them all feel the same. :-(

I see your point (and others have made the same) but warlocks are not actually less powerful than clerics. It's more a "what style of magic do I want to grant" thing than there really being a good reason to grant one kind or another? And if you want a powerful servant whose magic depends on...

Not a bad selection. Clockwork sorcerer to counterbalance the aberrant sorcerer is a good choice. Celestial warlock is a bit odd from a worldbuilding perspective. Why would celestial powers create a warlock instead of a cleric or paladin?

AD&D magic items deserving of unreasonable love? There are many, but the following are burned into my memory so I don't even need to open the DMG. Horn of Valhalla -- so much fun to summon a squad of einherjar for those big fights that my DM finally had a high-level thief steal it :.-( Frost...

A mundane Ranger who gets cumulative "quarry" bonuses for each action spent actually stalking, observing or researching their target. A mundane Strategist who has a wider variety and more powerful maneuvers than the battlemaster, many of which trigger off of allies' actions. A mundane Armiger...

I guess what bothers me is that the gap in the line of effect is larger than the effect itself. You can fit a whole squad between the MU's hands and the point where the LB starts doing damage! Does the squad at least feel a slight tingling?

LB is a really weird visual for 3rd parties when you stop to think about it...a MU gestures and incants far away from their target, and "something happens" to release the linear bolt close to the target. Do they make a little storm cloud appear? Does a portal open to the quasi-elemental plane of...

God of the Neutral Planet in Futurama? "If I don't make it, tell my wife...hello"

It's even better when you rent an Airbnb for you and your friends!

I was always confused by the subduing rules because they didn't seem to offer any downside over regular combat but I think I just had a breakthrough. Was the idea that an attempt to subdue only lasts one round? So if PCs Alice, Bob and Curly manage to position themselves to melee...

Really nice artwork!

Halfling matchmakers are actually part of a millenia-spanning consipracy to breed generations with more and more luck. Kind of like the Bene Gesserit or Pearson's Puppeteers, but more benevolent. Marriages are not arranged so much as determined through complicated games of chance and survival...

Eh, I don't feel like it's the worst subsystem in AD&D. The basic structure of PSPs, disciplines/sciences and their acquisition (levels of mastery, which when you read the rules carefully are clearly staggered), and the rules for those powers are perfectly playable as written. The psionic...

For some reason this perspective reminded me of the racism present in Lovecraft's stories. What if the other races view humans and their gods horror and revulsion? What if they see humans as a primitive race, lacking the ability to even plan long-term and insiduously diluting the purity and...

The OP poses an excellent question, really. In the rules, the advantages and disadvantages of other species are always expressed relative to a human baseline. But what if some other species is considered the baseline? For example, if humans are newcomers in a world dominated by (wood) elves...

Responding to the ideas above that humans are prone to personification, finding imaginary patterns, and memetic programming... if this is a vulnerability that is uniquely human perhaps we could represent it in game terms as a penalty to wisdom relative to other races (but apparently we don't do...