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I think D&D's status as the 8000-lb. red dragon has been a negative both for D&D (as the owners try to make it all things to all people) and for the RPG hobby as a whole (as so many things get suffocated or warped to fit into its unique shape).

Check out Daniel James Hanley's Ghastly Affair for this very thing using an OSR foundation: DriveThruRPG

Speak for yourself. ;)

I've long figured it was released a year or two ahead of schedule, both in terms of 'what the market was ready for' and 'how much design work had gone into it.' I think a lot of the designers were assuming a level of dissatisfaction with 3.5's rough points that either wasn't there, or that...

No, the Dragonlance iteration came first, and the Marvel version second, being published two years after Dragonlance: Fifth Age. The SAGA iteration of Marvel should not be confused with the earlier FASERIP version.

Tab Creations appears to have done some work retro-cloning it, but I haven't taken a look at their products yet.

I love it and ran several games of it ... but never in Dragonlance. I ran some playtest sessions for the Ravenloft variant that I wrote for DRAGON Magazine, as well as short-lived campaigns based off the Dragon Quest (fka Dragon Warrior) and Final Fantasy 1 video game settings.

Making that promise explicit was half the mistake--the other half was making the changes too obvious. 3E and 5E kept or brought back enough chrome and surface features to disguise the underlying differences until people were already invested in the game. :) But I think there was a...

The quote in question appears to be from Logan Bonner's comments on skills in Wizards Presents: Races and Classes, p. 68.

Given that this book had a cultural consultant, does it include any notes about the fact that Asmodeus is a demon in a book (Tobit) held as Sacred Scripture by a majority of the world's Christians, and his use and portrayal in D&D may seem inaccurate or misguided to some?

Good. I'm still not buying the product for a host of reasons, but at least they managed to avoid that misstep.

He claims to be summarizing, and the other spoilers match what other sources have said ...

They defined the Dark Powers.

Thanks for the information. It sounds decidedly more over-the-top than I'm looking for, among other things.

And immediately follows it with "His exact appearance in each race and gender is always the same, however, and is determined by greater powers." RA1 Feast of Goblyns confirms that "Unlike most wolfweres, Harkon Lukas is cursed by the Dark Powers of Ravenloft. Because of this curse, he always...

Ah, but ever since the original setting, it's been stated that while Harkon can choose race (presumably in D&D sense) and gender, his exact appearance in each form is fixed. RA1 Feast of Goblyns even has him resorting to a magical item to get around this. Well, there is this illustration:

The important question is ... can monks Suplex the engine? :)

I only just noted that the last page of the book is a 'spirit board.' Was Jack Chick only forty years ahead of his time? :)

Everything I'm seeing suggests that they're taking out a lot of the elements I liked (classic monster archetypes, the Gothic atmosphere, the moral underpinnings of the setting, the product aesthetics), doubling-down on elements I didn't like (the real-world fortunetelling elements, the...

This arguably reflects the broader change in D&D's philosophy from TSR--"D&D as a way to do all sorts of fantasy adventure stories"--to WotC--"D&D as its own unique genre and multiverse."