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I wouldn't even put it down to the fanbase fracturing due to this or that event. I haven't seen much evidence of that outside of very specific online communities. My theory is that 2020 boom was another side effect of the pandemic lockdown. You know, that massive society upending event that no...

True, but half the reason for that is that the PHB full casters got stealth buffed with every book because they kept adding new spells. New spells are a great page filler player option. And again, most of them were garbage, but a few of them were overpowered, and the overpowered ones built up...

My memory of 3.5e is that the quality control was pretty uneven. Each new supplement was packed full of player options. Of those, some would be alright, a lot would be garbage, and two or three per book would be overpowered. This meant things were fairly balanced with a limited list of allowed...

Reincarnate is very quintessentially part of the old "Hardcore Mode Roguelike" style of D&D. You roll up your character and see how far you can get this time, and there's perma-death but with expensive respawns, only here's a budget option with a chance to backfire. Maybe your PC becomes...

Minimal art direction was the standard of the time. Book covers for science fiction and fantasy novels were infamous for having little to no relationship with the actual material. And for how often the artist just recycled what they were familiar with, aka Star Wars or Star Trek, because all...

Alright, I'll take you folk's word and accept it as "very likely Lord Soth". I just wanted to be sure. I've seen some hasty and unhinged fan theories over the years.

Okay, just a quick sanity check. I was never the biggest DL lore nerd, so cross check me on this. Is there anything about the art image that's definitively Lord Soth? Or is it just a generic looking Death Knight, and we all assumed it was Soth because he's one of the only named Death Knights and...

Maybe it's a generational thing. I started playing D&D at a young age in 1990. Those DL modules originally came out across '84-'86. So it was the AD&D 1e crowd that really caught those, while I came in just as 2e was getting going. We never really went back and played the old modules. And since...

Dragonlance was well known and beloved for its novels. I've had friends who were really invested in them. But I don't think I've ever known someone who had been using it as a campaign setting. No actual play stories, no beloved characters. It's just not nearly as game friendly as other settings...

This is a tactic we were theorycrafting back before 5.5e even launched. Yes, it should absolutely work. It'd be a little harder to justify with the Tiny sized familiars, even the ones who have hands, but outfitting your Skeleton familiar with adventurer sized items is a major unlisted perk.

I'll confess, I don't think I ever owned any of the Dark Sun TTRPG books back in the 90's. Maybe one random supplement, but not any of the box sets. What I mostly had was the first novel and the two CRPG games. And "Champions fighting to save a dying world" is definitely a valid take on the Dark...

Indeed. With private, official playtesting they have a clear idea of what conditions it was playtested under, and know the data is reliable. With public submissions, they have no idea what scenario you put it through. They have no idea if you misread or misunderstood the material. They have no...

Indeed. To put it simply, UA isn't open source game design. It's market research. Which has more impact on the final release than just being early promotional material, but less impact than when they're soliciting specific design feedback from trusted play testers.

Sans the announcement of a change, I wouldn't assume the standard release model of the last however many years is changing. They didn't specify the two week early release because no specific release date was given, just the general month.

Well we have had a new Artificer subclass come through UA. The Reanimator, all the way back in Horror Subclasses in May 2025. Though that does bring up an interesting point. Normally I'd say that they're doing to do a Tasha's again and reprint the entire Artificer in Arcana Unleashed, plus one...

I've watched some videos by an artist going over character designs from various video games, like Marvel Rivals and Pokemon. Actually there's a lot of people doing those sorts of videos now, but she's got some actual schooling and brings up things like color theory and shape meaning. And it's...

What is it if not a player options book? The announced content is subclasses, backgrounds, origin feats, spells, and another stab at the classic "magic items that level with the PC" idea. A bit more tightly themed than an Everything book, but most of the usual material is there. All that's...

I could see them reprinting it in Arcana Unleashed, just so it's in a general issue player options book and not just one little setting book. Not every time, but once? Yeah, sure, they did that last time.

I wouldn't take that as a given. If all the Chain Pact features are overwritten or redundant with what the spell offers, there won't be much real synergy. So we're going to have to wait to see what the exact mechanical execution is like.

I'm interested in what it does differently than VRG, as opposed to just updating. Getting stat blocks for the Dark Lords is already an important shift. In fact, those look like major section entries devoted to Strahd and Cthulhu, as opposed to the more setting focus in VRG. The shifts in tact...