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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Morgenstern" data-source="post: 1067250" data-attributes="member: 5485">What Moridin? You aren't getting a laugh out of a statement like "nobody but WotC produces color books"? All I see in it is a person who doesn't look at enough books by companies other than WotC to be telling me about "the industry" as a whole <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=":)" />.To be fair, is it common? No. Is it somehow imposible for any one but WotC? Obviously not. Is it expensive? Hell yes. Does it contribute to my desire to purchase a product? Yes. Corallary: does its absence reduce my desire to purchase a book? Yes, slightly. Particularly in hardback books which are kicking off a product line. I certainly don't expect color art in softcovers.Let me weigh in on AU for just a moment, as I've only looked through the book, not bought one. The presence or absence of color art didn't really make an impression on me. Layout is much more important to me, because I see game text in simple form all the time- I write it, and I edit about half a dozen other authors' work in that format. Plain text is nice for editing, but it's boring as heck to look at. Having a book prinited in that format (or double columns and not much else) does not detract from the quality of the text, but IT DOES detract from the value of the product -to me-. A book is significantly more than one guy puting his thoughts on paper. It is the summation of several different talents including editing, art, and layout. And the layout guy did not strike me as putting in as much effort as some of the rest of the team. Is this enough to damn a book all by itself IMO? No, but it is a vote against purchase of any book if I'm on the fence.Overall I expect I'll pick it up at some point, because I'm a very system oriented guy, and because having followed the design diaries, I saw a lot of evidence that Mr. Cooke's design theory is similar to mine, and I want to see what he's done with it in a fantasy-but-not-D&D context. I don't expect I'll run DT, but I don't runned canned campaigns period so no real negative observation there. I'm looking for a toolbox with some ideas in it, and AU looks promising. The racial levels aren't a new idea, but I'm hoping to get some that are well implemented, if only as a suggestion for how I can do them myself for my own campaigns in the future. The three version spell system also sounds interesting to my cold little mechanics driven heart <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />.Anyone but me think the Loresong faen are modeled after the gelflings in The Dark Crystal <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=":)" />?</blockquote>

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