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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Owen K.C. Stephens" data-source="post: 854254" data-attributes="member: 3190">First, let me say that while I appreciate everyone being polite and professional, feel free to call me "Owen." If you're writing directly to me in a forum, or sending me an e-mail, or even run into me at GenCon, I'm much more comfortable with Owen than “Mr. Stephens,” which always makes me think my father's around somewhere. <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=":-)" />Heh. You know, one of the reasons a group of people got Special Thanks in this book is that they've been playing in games from my fevered mind for years, and this kind of thing comes naturally to me. In fact, the ideas for some of these horrors are straight out of my own games.The Lasher was just an obvious choice for me. Ropers in my games are subterranean creatures with strong ties to rock and stone. So are dwarves. And I prefer having an evil dwarf have something -wrong- with it rather than just be pale and nasty. Lashers are exactly the sort of things my players have to deal with, though I haven't actually sprung them on my PCs yet.I do think of power creep as one of the greatest failings of many sourcebooks. While some of it is inevitable whenever you add new options, as they may combine in ways the individual authors had not expected, I believe a sourcebook is most useful when it provides options that are interesting, but not obviously superior to existing options.Thanks!Again, thanks for the kind words!And of course, this is one way of avoiding the question of how ECL-ed races balance with non-ECL-ed races. Another idea I have had is to run a game where there is an assumed ECL shift, say of +5, and everyone who played a race of less ECL than that got +1 feat, +3 hp and +4 skill points per ECL they are under, so to soup them up to the same power as the ECL races (and make human characters still appealing in such a game). I haven't seriously looked at the balance issues for doing that, though.There's an enhancement/preview in last week’s D20 Weekly, which you can easily find in the archives if you subscribe (<a href="http://www.d20weekly.com" target="_blank">www.d20weekly.com</a>). It has one breed from the book (the wretch, one of my favs as well), and then one whole new breed write-up for the Quarterling (half-human / half-halfling, another product of my own games), and two new templates, the half-barghest and the half-sphinx. I don’t believe there are any other plans for a web enhancement, but D20 Weekly is cheap, good, and has a new issue every week. (I don’t work for SJGs, but I am a good friend of editor Steve Miller, who’s name you’ll find next to mine on many Star Wars books, and I do write a lot for the magazine, so take my recommendations as officially biased.)LOL. Yeah, I’m twisted, and since Monte already did the Book of Vile Darkness, I felt liberated to pull no punches. Seriously, a lot of ideas came from long running games, and a lot came from looking at races with an average Int of 8 or higher and pondering how I could work a half-breed of them into the book. The rest you just have to chalk up to me being a sicko.</blockquote>

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