December & Beyond: Previews

[Rechan]

Thanks for the list. I'm looking forward to all of those.

Be aware that when I say 'edited by me', I mean that I edited out all the ones I'm less enthusiastic about. There's more on the list, like 'death, dying and negative hitpoints', and stuff like that.

 

[DaveMage]

That was the weakest "and beyond" column I've ever seen.

Where are the early mins previews?

Where's the Stormreach preview?

 

[JohnSnow]

The dwarf women keep cropping up because people can't seem to let go of Tolkien (and even he never said they were bearded...)

Yes, he did. Well, not as such, but he did say the following:

"It was said by Gimli that there are few dwarf-women, probably no more than a third of the whole people. They seldom walk abroad except at great need. They are in voice and appearance, and in garb if they must go on a journey, so like to the dwarf-men that the eyes and ears of other peoples cannot tell them apart." - RK, 360 (App A).

Since all the dwarf men we hear about are bearded, one must assume dwarf women are as well (part of the similarity in appearance). What Tolkien did doesn't have to be relevant to D&D, but that's where the notion comes from.

 

[Falstaff]

D&D World: History of the Core World

Interesting. Will the Core World be a setting fully described? Will there be a setting book with maps? I would really like a setting book that's a generic D&D world that supports all the elements of the core game. Is this their plan?

 

[The Ubbergeek]

Thanks for the list. I'm looking forward to all of those.

Except the "history" one ... so far I've been nonplussed regarding that. It seems every race except humans and halflings had an "ancient empire, destroyed by war."

My thoughts were:
1. Just one empire? Humans (IRL) have had dozens of "ancient empires, destroyed by war." Is WotC saying the other races are all underachievers?
2. Humans (in-game) haven't had any ancient empires? No Egypt or Mesopotamia or Rome? No previous Dynasties? Why not?
3. Why always war? How about a flaming mountain thrown down from heaven? It's not original, but at least it's different. The racial histories so far are sounding like a broken record. Any why can't they just die of corruption/stagnation from within, like most (IRL) Empires do?

i'll bite.

1. Maybe the setting will be originaly set more localy... and we have BIG empires in the past, like the Roman one.

2. localy maybe, again? Since it's PoL, and the distant regions are maybe not known much... Mysterious... heresay...

3. Sadly, war ALWAYS is a constant of our history... and really, you see this any different in a fantasy world? even other races would find excuses for war...

 

[Rechan]

In my experiences, empires are usually forged via war. From the Romans, to Ghengis Khan, to Alexander the Great, to the British.

Empires aren't founded by the Empire knocking on someone's door and saying, "Why hello. You are now ours." "But we're... us. Are you sure we're you now?" "Well... do you have a flag?" "No." "Well, we have a flag. So you're ours. Have a good day - we will be by on Tuesday to collect taxes."

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

Empires aren't founded by the Empire knocking on someone's door and saying, "Why hello. You are now ours." "But we're... us. Are you sure we're you now?" "Well... do you have a flag?" "No." "Well, we have a flag. So you're ours. Here are our taxes, and have a good day."

Eminently siggable

 

[drothgery]

I swear that if they don't stop putting up documents as .pdf.zip, I'm going to keep complaining about it until they do.

Seriously, html would be best (why am I changing my browsing habits here? I went to your site, now show me what I wanted!), but failing that, .pdf would be quite nice.

[...]

So the only reason they can be doing this is to save themselves a bit of bandwidth costs.

I don't like zipped PDFs either, but they're that way so the default behavior in popular web browsers is save, rather than open.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

Eminently siggable

It was a little better the way Eddie Izzard originally wrote it. From memory:

We stole countries with the cunning use of flags. Just sail 'round the world and stick a flag in!

"I claim India for Britain!"

"You can't claim us, we live here! Five hundred million of us!"

". . . do you have a flag?"

"We don't need a flag, this is our country, you bastards!"

"No flag, no country, you can't have one! That's the rules that . . . I've just made up."

 

[Lackhand]

I don't like zipped PDFs either, but they're that way so the default behavior in popular web browsers is save, rather than open.

Yeah? Well, I like them even less.
I assume the default behavior as saving it is good because they don't want you to load the pdf multiple times?

I mean, even there, I find the previews view once and forget thereafter: unlike, say, adventures, which I will want to have saved locally, once I'm done looking at the preview, I'm really done.

Scott Rouse, fix this for me! I command it!