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That's a great question, one I had to answer for myself when WotC announced the upcoming Forgotten Realms books. The introduction to the Travel Guide addresses the possibility of discrepancies between different Forgotten Realms campaign setting products. To paraphrase, the Dungeon Master can...

I'm too busy polishing up the Forgotten Realms Travel Guide to write a lengthy post today, so here are two illustrations from the book: the shortest and tallest Humanoids native to Zakhara (shown to scale). (Some stock art courtesy of pixabay.com and shutter stock.com.)

Personally, I've had more fun playing a changeling against type. My changeling character was honest to a fault and refused to use shapechanging to deceive others. Instead, the changeling wore the same, identifiable face at all times, modified in small ways to reflect their current mood. (The...

I'm inclined to say "Zariel" is the name attached to anyone serving as rightful Lord of Avernus. Asmodeus strips the name from any former lord and gifts to their successor as a badge of office. (Bel was just a placeholder, so Asmodeus never renamed him. Bel was blinded by hubris after seizing...

There's some gaslighting in that Richard Baker article. He (correctly) observes that the 2e map of Faerun would have been about one-third ocean if placed on a 20" by 30" poster map. What he neglects to mention is that the 3e poster map of Faerun is still about 31% ocean. And to get that 2%...

Fantastic article! Incidentally... If you need to stack a mix of books and boxed sets, the best approach is to stack books inside unrelated boxed sets until every box holds just enough to keep it from closing all the way. At that point, you know the sides of the box aren't bearing any weight...

To answer the questions in the OP: 1. I'm fond of the Forgotten Realms for nostalgic reasons. The original grey box was my first exposure to any campaign setting (and to the idea of a campaign setting poster map). I was a kid at the time, and I didn't really understand what a campaign setting...

Now I'm imagining an epicurean campaign setting where the origin story of every Humanoid species other than Halfling is "Halfling that ate X." (It would be a world where Aasimar are the edge lords, not Tieflings, because Aasimar get their traits by killing and eating angels!)

Yep. That's what I was vaguely misremembering. The dragon-colored kobolds.

I haven't been following Pathfinder since the early days of its first edition. I do seem to recall Paizo leaning hard into the draconic nature of kobolds with dragonscale variants at one point. That probably subconsciously influenced my thinking about dragonborn and kobolds to some degree.

Hmm. Maybe kobolds as a group are becoming slowly more draconic over time. Early kobolds were dog-faced people. Modern kobolds are more dragon-like. And dragonborn are the next evolution of kobolds.

I was brainstorming ways to incorporate dragonborn into older D&D settings which don't currently include lore for dragonborn, and found myself wondering: What if dragonborn were just kobolds who tapped into their latent draconic ancestry? In other words, there's no separate dragonborn species...

I imagine a lot of DM/player drama could be avoided by asking everyone during session 0: "Do you consider a characters' class to be the "basic premise" of that character?" If different people at the table have different answers to that question, they might not be a good fit for one another in...

I'll concede I may have misinterpreted your prior posts and been ungenerous as a result. I got the impression you were referring to baseline warlock class features as "cool super powers" as a way to imply the gamist approach to the warlock class is cartoonish when compared to a narrativist or...

Close, but I'm fairly sure it's actually the Top Hat, in the bishop 4 square, with the 12 armies.

That's fair. Everyone should play at tables that support their own preferred play style. I, for example, don't want to play in a game where every warlock must hit the exact same narrative beats in every story, or where every possible plot hook must be on screen and relevant in every campaign. I...

So is it more or less moral to mind control someone if they're Daniel Craig? Hmm... :P

To expand on your point, I'll add some D&D-specific pedantry: "species" is used in the 1989 AD&D 2e Player's Handbook, page 29: "Before advancing to 2nd level, every ranger must select a species enemy. Typical enemies include giants, orcs, lizard men, trolls, or ghouls." Note that orcs are...