Birthright!

[mmadsen]

On the main EN World page, there's a scoop that Birthright is coming out for Third Edition; birthright.net has made the announcement:

The upcoming official conversion
New Edition Rules Book!
Rediscover the Birthright® campaign-a land of legend-with this new edition. The fallen god of evil, Azrai, was sundered into pieces and his blood continues to empower his wicked followers. Prevent the spawn of evil from gathering their former lord's power and rekindling the bonfire of destruction! Updated and revised for maximum adventure.

The Birthright developer group has been hard at work the last few months, putting together a 3rd Edition version of the Birthright world. The upcoming document will feature the most thorough conversion to date of our favorite D&D Campaign setting!

The work that has been done, and is still underway, will stay true both to the spirit of Birthright, and the spirit of the 3rd Edition rules. It will feature a complete conversion of races, classes, bloodlines, monsters, and more. New skills, feats, and other little mechanical goodies have been designed especially for the Birthright world. The revision of the domain rules promises to bring them fully up to date with the changes that happened between 2nd and 3rd Edition.

I never played the original Second-Edition Birthright, but from what I've heard about it, I'm quite excited about the new edition. Even if you don't care for the setting, the rules and suggestions for ruling a kingdom should flesh out high-level play.

 

[rounser]

I'm more excited about seeing the setting itself - it's been rated as being TSR's finest setting (other than Al Qadim) by more than a few people in the past...

 

[Geoff Watson]

I'd rather see a general 'rule dominions and do political stuff' book instead of limiting it to just one setting. They should have the BR setting as an example like they had the great wheel as an example in MotP, with several other examples.

Geoff.

 

[Sulimo]

I'd rather see a general 'rule dominions and do political stuff' book instead of limiting it to just one setting. They should have the BR setting as an example like they had the great wheel as an example in MotP, with several other examples.

Geoff.

Yeah. Me too. That was one of the few probs I had with the earlier version. It wasnt terribly easy to seperate from the setting - the bloodlines and so forth.

The other thing I would like is for it to deal with a variety of types of domains, scale wise. So, the rules cover games where PC's have a single castle or temple right up to being Kings and so forth.

 

[Wolf72]

I'm just gonna say that the cover looked awesome

 

[King_Stannis]

as one of the official birthright pimps i can only say.....

wahooo!

 

[Cam Banks]

I've been running a sort of variant Birthright campaign mostly-weekly for several months, and I've been using Travis' 3E conversions (which can be found on the Birthright site.) There's always room for some improvement, so I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with, but it's been a great deal of fun.

Although a generic "political/dominion" book might be nice, to my mind the biggest attraction for BR isn't so much the ability to govern nations and holdings, but the setting itself. It's like a cross between Tolkien and Highlander, and the epic scale of the adventures possible in it make it very appealing. Truth be told, the most interesting part of the campaign as it's being run isn't the dominion-ruling part. We reserve a session once in a while for that, then dive back into the story again.

I do need to set up a page for my campaign, however - it's different enough from Birthright setting-wise to warrant it. I use the BR pantheon, but it's not set in Cerilia (or at least the map is entirely different) and borrows heavily from Elizabeth Willey's "Well-Favored Man" series of books.

Cheers,
Cam

 

[mmadsen]

I'd rather see a general 'rule dominions and do political stuff' book instead of limiting it to just one setting. They should have the BR setting as an example like they had the great wheel as an example in MotP, with several other examples.

Although I've heard great things about the Birthright setting -- as rounser has too -- I think a lot of us would like to see a "political" book. Just look at the L5R Daimyos using Birthright? for one example. I wonder if the epic book is going to handle ruling kingdoms at all?

 

[bolen]

Is this a real book or a long downloadable (free??) PDF?

 

[Sigma]

The setting is what kept me away from Birthright in the first place. If I run a typical D&D game (as opposed to a spelljammer or planescape game), I'd rather use my own generic world than someone else's. That's half the fun. I never picked up Birthright because I looked at it and said 'oh joy, another fantasy setting, how exciting'. After I found out about the domain and political rules, I kicked myself for not taking a closer look.