Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8030288" data-attributes="member: 18">You're talking about Zeb Cook and you're skipping over Taladas, Snarf? C'mon. You're more of a historian than that! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Zeb Cook is an amazing designer, and Planescape was his peak design, just astonishing. However, Taladas was ridiculously better than Oriental Adventures, which was more a sort of simple attempt to codify tropes and a bit confused in where it was going (even leaving problematic elements aside), whereas Taladas demonstrated something truly amazing, a sort of remix of real-world history, particularly the poor-utilized sort of 400-900AD period, together with using AD&D's races in an extremely daring way, and topped off by bringing in cultures and areas often ignored by D&D and using them in a way that worked, and adding with some tremendous outright-fantasy cultures, including what I think may be the first mainstream depiction of competent engineer-gnomes.I often wondered why such a daring and weird book was the first setting book for 2E - but given he was 2E's lead designer, that makes a lot of sense.I think Zeb Cook's genius was in cultures and the specificity of them. I think he started learning about that with OA, maybe (hard to say), but certainly by Taladas he'd really nailed it, and was going kind of "no fear" with it, too, and then Planescape, he took it to whole other level, looking at subcultures, the cultures that could develop around not just places and peoples, but ideas, and thoughts, and concepts.(Which is why I particularly frown at Monte Cook for ruining all that with his terrible second part in his alleged Planescape trilogy of adventures, which remains unfinished - he replaced these brilliant and daring factions with leaden three-letter-acronym organisations, which had no specificity, no subtlety, not touch of magic or humanity or understanding. Leaden.)</blockquote>

Verification