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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 8563691" data-attributes="member: 8461">The last book in the "Option" line is one that wasn't originally part of the line at all, since I doubt many people overlooked how, when it came out in 1999, <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17026/Campaign-Option-Council-of-Wyrms-Setting-2e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank">Campaign Option: Council of Wyrms Setting</a> had already been released five years prior as the <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17357/Council-Of-Wyrms-2e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank">Council of Wyrms</a> boxed set.Now, reading over the two products' histories on their sales pages, this was apparently done because the original boxed set was highly popular, and reprinting it in a more economical book format was apparently fairly cheap for WotC (particularly since the writing, editing, and development was already complete), but at the time all I saw was the "updated and expanded from the original boxed set" tagline on the cover. I was an absolute sucker for things like that - and, to be fair, I was pretty stoked about being able to play a dragon PC anyway - and so I snatched it up immediately, since I hadn't gotten the original boxed set yet.In hindsight, and having since picked up said boxed set, the updates and expansions are somewhat overblown. They basically consist of folding in some articles from Dragon magazine, and they also removed some of the key NPC statistics that were found on the back of the cardstock inserts that the boxed set had, along with the clan overview poster. Plus, the huge poster map of Io's Blood Isles from the original is much more aesthetically pleasing than the tinier, black and white reprint in the hardcover (also, notice that the hardcover has rotated the orientation of the Isles ninety degrees counterclockwise!).The "campaignlet" - I can't think of it in any other term, since it's "you can drop this setting into any major ocean in your campaign world" presentation struck me as being a little too stark - that was Io's Blood Isles was, unto itself, something of a point of frustration for me. While I loved how much it showcased all the ways in which a dragon society would work, its remoteness seemed to work against it, at least in terms of interesting developments. To be fair, it plays this up, as the entire premise of the setting is that the dragons exist in an uneasy truce now after Io, the supreme dragon god, sent human dragonslayers from the other side of the world on a holy war against them, knowing that the dragons would have to unite against such dangerous enemies. And it worked, but I couldn't get over the idea that this ended up keeping the dragons constrained in their isolationist stance.For comparison, I loved Fantasy Flight Games' <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonstar_(role-playing_game)" target="_blank">Dragonstar</a> setting, which basically was a fusion of Council of Wyrms and Spelljammer. That product took the underlying ideas here - that of a dragon society that was barely held together in a truce - and took it to its natural conclusion, which was that when the dragons could actually bring themselves to put aside their differences (however begrudgingly) and work together, they were unstoppable. In that case, they created an empire that had already been around for millennia and was expanding throughout the galaxy...and had just now discovered your campaign world.Don't get me wrong, the adventures here aren't bad - though I personally liked "The Sleeping Dragon" in Dungeons #48 better (it had a magic item that allowed you to summon, and maybe control, the Tarrasque!) - but somehow the politics involved always seemed too small. Worse, it seemed almost impossible to transport most of what was here outside of a potential Council of Wyrms campaign; power-gamer that I was, not even I could seriously entertain the notion of playing a dragon PC in an otherwise standard game.Of course, the same couldn't be said of half-dragons (which, to be fair, I also first read about in the "Part Dragon, All Hero" article in Dragon #206, and the fact that I remember all of those supporting articles in D&D's magazines is all the proof you need as to how much I liked the ideas herein, even if I would later find the presentation imperfect). I loved the idea of them, and apparently I wasn't the only one, since 3E's half-dragon template (which, unlike the 2E race, could be for any dragon type, not just those with a natural ability to take a humanoid form) quickly became ubiquitous to the point of being a meme. Personally, my favorite riff on the concept is in Casey Brown's <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/260950/LG-BK-Classics-2-Love-Letter?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank">LG BK Classics 2: Love Letter</a>, where, while delivering the eponymous love letter for a horny red dragon suitor to a nearby green wyrm, you encounter some of his children, which are, wait for it...red half-dragon sheep!But to bring things back around, this book was a great idea with fairly good execution...but only with regard to the mechanical level. In terms of a setting, they did the best they could, but the constraints of not taking what was here to their natural conclusion showed, and I can't help but find myself wishing that this re-release had pushed back against that, even if I understand why it didn't. In the end, this book deserves to be part of the "Option" series because it really is exactly what it says in the title: a campaign option, rather than a full campaign unto itself.Please note my use of affiliate links in this post.</blockquote>

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