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If Wizards meant to turn the Heartlands into what were called 'blank lands' in Glorantha, as Sembia was for a few years... I think that would be a very bad idea for many reasons that don't pertain to this thread. But they could, in that case, and I don't think it's so, at the very least tell us.

The beef is that there are many millions of words of unpublished Realmslore about the core Realms (which Jeff Grubb called the Heartlands, and is both the most popular and the most fundamental to the setting), and that the last 'detailed' sources on them, the Volo's Guides (which never covered...

Yes, it makes more sense for OSRIC because it's mainly a technical editorial task. But the numbering system, with its smell of planned obsolescence, still smells bad.

Imagining what it's like to be other people, to be in distant places, is fundamental training in creative, imaginative thinking, which is the basis of empathy, artistic work, and social change -- being able to picture a different world. Alongside literacy, I think this is by far the main benefit...

I'm looking at the book right now: the Dwarves of Middle-earth booklet in the Moria boxed set, for Decipher's LRRPG.

I strongly agree: because it's essentially a New! Improved! marketing gimmick that draws a misleading analogy between RPGs (creative works) and computer programs (where later versions are often legitimately better because they're written for more powerful hardware).

I haven't read the book on Khazad-dûm itself, but the set's smaller book on the dwarves of Middle-earth, by Chris Seeman, is an extremely sensitive and plausible expansion of Tolkien's dwarf lore.

To enlarge a little on that, 'coolness' is momentary and flashy and selfish and easy, whereas heroism is about courage and sacrifice. To be *visibly* heroic it helps a lot to be, say, good at fighting. In return, the collective imagination depicts heroes as tall, handsome, noble-born, and other...

Yes. No, but it helps. Try it and find out.

Henchmen are characters, sidekicks; hirelings just faceless troops.

I'd say that heroism is a dramatic phenomenon, and 'coolness' is antithetical to drama.

Amazingly, the straw-man position has fewer votes! Far more DMs will fudge rolls to prevent PC death than to actively enforce a preconceived plot.

I don't believe it was well trod in 1980; treating magic items foremost in terms of lore was not mainstream then, but it was in 1990, and I don't know why you wouldn't partly credit Ed for that.

I see RPGs more in story than game terms, and I 'call whatever naturally happens in the game, "the story"'. You have a disjunct between the name of the poll and the detailed terms, Quasqueton! More exactly, you're defining the 'story' approach as 'fixed DM's story', which is not (in my...

Realms sources frequently give mechanically minor magic items unique descriptions and histories, and assume that most have them. Magic things don't have to be ancient or mechanically unique to be special. I'm not arguing editions, I'm talking about augment crystals, which as presented in the...

They sound sensible if you like magic items as interchangeable mass-produced technology. To me this approach goes in completely the wrong direction, away from the outlook Ed Greenwood pioneered in Dragon of making each item unique and historied. What's exciting about these? They seem just more...

A couple of Issaries, Inc.'s Glorantha sourcebooks -- Glorantha, Introduction to the Hero Wars (out of print) and the Dragon Pass gazetteer -- are systemless. (And the rest of the HeroQuest line uses its very concise and transparent ability + number stat format.)

A good secondary-world sourcebook, with or without game rules, is a denser work of story and ideas than almost any novel (or campaign), with the seeds of many, many stories in it. It's a big shame that so many people prefer fully manifested stories that the world sourcebook is, mostly, an...

Before this thread, I never heard a bad word said about FRQ1 Haunted Halls of Eveningstar. It's one of my favourite modules, with exemplary integration of dungeon and setting, and it's a tremendous, inspiring microcosm of an involved low-level Realms campaign -- even in its severely cut-down...

Almost all British books and magazines use them, Butcher's and Hart's Rules specify them . . . I also (though I find myself writing in weird transatlantic hybrids on message boards) think double quotation marks are ugly because gratuitous.