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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 8544804" data-attributes="member: 8461">Let's just put this front and center: the next book in the "Option" series, <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/16866/Dungeon-Masters-Options-HighLevel-Campaigns?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank">Dungeon Master's Option: High-Level Campaigns</a> is (to my mind) the single best take on the subject in the whole of D&D.While it was preceded by BECMI's <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17167/DD-Master-Set-BECMI-ed-Basic?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank">Master Set</a>, and followed by 3E's <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/23683/Epic-Level-Handbook-3e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank">Epic Level Handbook</a>, I feel confident that the flag regarding the best book about adventuring once your party's levels have hit the double digits can be planted here. Of course, one might argue that those are relatively unimpressive contenders, and I won't say that everything here is superb by any means - in fact, a lot of what's in this book was first seen elsewhere - but faint praise is still praise, and this supplement deserves it.It's to HLC's credit (anyone notice how this book seems to defy being easily reduced to its initials? You see the other books in the series being abbreviated as C&T, S&P, etc., but not this one) that it doesn't take a hard-line view on what "high-level" means. Unless I missed a notation somewhere, the book just sort of assumes that it starts right around level 10 or so - that "double digits" mention I made in the previous paragraph wasn't idle - and goes up from there. Given how the 21-30 range is so often dismissed as being irrelevant for how most campaigns never even come close to it (it's no coincidence that 4th Edition never got a Dungeon Master's Guide 3) and/or is disdained as the realm of power-gaming munchkins, it's perhaps no surprise that the book takes a more expansive view.That's actually one of the points that's stuck with me ever since I first read this supplement: it flat-out stated, as a universal rule unbound from any particular campaign setting, that 30th level was the ceiling for character advancement, full stop. I mention that because AD&D 2nd Edition, more than any other iteration of the game, waffled back and forth over just how high characters could potentially advance.Really, it's the only version of the game to be that wishy-washy when it came to whether or not there was a hard limit on character leveling. Original D&D, AD&D 1st Edition, and D&D 3rd Edition (via the ELH) all made it clear that characters could potentially gain infinite levels (demihuman limits notwithstanding). Holmes Basic, B/X, and BECMI all had limits in the levels their respective boxed sets covered, all the way to BECMI offering thirty-six levels for mortals, another thirty-six levels for Immortals, and then dared you to do it all over again. And of course, 4th Edition said right out of the box that you couldn't go past 30th level, with 5E doing the same for 20th (plus epic boons, of course).But AD&D 2nd Edition? Well, the Core Rulebooks only present twenty levels for the various classes, with no rules about gaining any others, but (if I recall correctly) it doesn't explicitly address things one way or another. Worse, supplements quickly came out that went back-and-forth on the issue in a rather confusing manner. For instance, very early in 2E's life, we had <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/16797/Forgotten-Realms-Adventures-2e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank">Forgotten Realms Adventures</a> reintroducing unlimited leveling (even if the expanded spell tables it gave for wizards and clerics stopped at 30th level), while <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/16889/PHBR4-The-Complete-Wizards-Handbook-2e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank">PHBR4 The Complete Wizard's Handbook</a> reinforced that message (albeit with expanded spell tables going to 32nd level), as did <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/16942/DMGR7-The-Complete-Book-of-Necromancers-2e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank">DMGR7 The Complete Book of Necromancers</a>. But <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17183/Dragon-Kings-2e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank">Dragon Kings</a> would cap progression at 30th level, though its status as being specific to Dark Sun would confuse the issue somewhat. At least <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17546/Netheril-Empire-of-Magic-2e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank">Netheril: Empire of Magic</a>, when it allowed characters to reach 45th(!) level, would say that was limited to that particular time, after which the gods lowered the ceiling.So yeah, having this sourcebook say, once and for all, that 30th level was as high as any character could go was really the last word on the issue (even if that Netheril boxed set came out after this).For what it's worth, the post-20th-level stuff is really confined to the book's last chapter anyway, and even then it takes a much more conservative tone than, say, 3E's Epic Level Handbook did. The introduction of "skills" as powers (with mechanics similar to nonweapon proficiencies) was a nice touch, particularly since they could in many cases be taken well before 20th level. There were also new abilities that were automatically unlocked beyond level twenty as well, and while I recall liking these, I'm a bit irked by how the high-level specialist wizard abilities from PHBR4 weren't reprinted here.Also, remember way back in my <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/complete-looking-back-at-the-leatherette-series-phbr-dmgr-hr-and-more.677493/post-8169089" target="_blank">look back</a> at PHBR2 The Complete Thief's Handbook when I said:Well, it turns out that was here! Man do I love the elegant simplicity of that rule. I'm not even that fond of thieves, but I really like how smartly that solves the issue of capping their abilities. Just brilliant.One other "epic" level thing that we got here was true dweomers, although whenever I come across that term, I feel like it needs to be capitalized. True Dweomers. Not like all those false dweomers your spellcasters have been using up until now. While very clearly the ancestor of the epic-level spell system we'd get in 3E, my impression is that they didn't live up to how awesome a moniker like "True Dweomers" sounded. I mean, I suppose that if you have to err, err on the side of caution, but these spells just didn't come across as the mightiest applications of magic. Just look at the examples: neja's toadstool...turned a character into a toadstool; is there a reason you can't just polymorph other them into a gerbil? Ratecliff's deadly finger is a hopped up finger of death spell that makes it harder than normal to resurrect someone. Yunni's herald sends a message and brings back a reply, which is about as un-epic as it gets.Honestly, the best true dweomers I ever saw (which, if I recall correctly, were the only time they appeared outside of this book) were the artificial single-caster recreations of the rain of colorless fire and the invoked devastation that your characters could find in <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17286/Reverse-Dungeon-2e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank">Reverse Dungeon</a>. Even then, the book didn't bother with their details, just noting that casting either one destroyed you and everything else within a one-mile radius.That said, I still found this better than the chapter on spell duels. Why oh why did anyone need that? It's the wizard version of a jousting match, and I've never understood why anyone would want to role-play what's essentially a sports match against someone else instead of raiding a dungeon, or assaulting a lich lord's keep, or besieging an evil temple, etc. Even now, my eyes glaze over when I read this.If that sounds like a lot of complaining for a book whose praises I was singing when I started this entry, these are the low points in what's otherwise a good book. The first two chapters have a lot of good advice for running adventures, and while they're mostly germane to higher-level stuff - such as the tables for varying levels of technology, magic, and even the passage of time, on other worlds (much like what we got in the AD&D 1E <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17009/Manual-of-the-Planes-1e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank">Manual of the Planes</a>) - they could almost have come right out of the Dungeon Master's Guide or <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/16887/DMGR1-Campaign-Sourcebook-and-Catacomb-Guide-2e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank">DMGR1 Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb Guide</a>.Throw in expanded clarifications of various spells and magic items (much like what we saw in the AD&D 1E DMG) and rules for creating/recharging magic items (somewhat truncated from how many pages they needed in the Book of Artifacts), and that's the book.Now, that probably all sounds like a hodgepodge of stuff, but similar to Combat & Tactics, what's going on here is that the book wants to be a one-stop shop of various materials that are likely to come up during a campaign that's hit the higher-levels. From general advice, to overviews on spells, to creating magic items, to building True Dweomers (and running spell duels, I guess), to going past level twenty, this book tries to cover all the bases without getting bogged down in any one aspect of the play. To that end, I think it succeeds more than it fails, and so I can't bring myself to begrudge this supplement for what it does.While it could have been better, there are plenty of examples for how it could easily have been worse, and so what's here is good enough for me.Please note my use of affiliate links in this post.</blockquote>

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