Dragon Compendium Table of Contents

[Lobo Lurker]

Hmm... I didn't see anything about Dragons in there... Kinda odd for a Dragon Compendium.

 

[Lobo Lurker]

Ahh, the magazine... talk about bait and switch. Looks interesting and useful seeing as how I don't actually buy Dragon Magazine.

Now if they'd do this for Dungeon (yes, I plan on picking up Shackled City and hopefully Age of Worms if they make it)...

 

[JoeGKushner]

wow, lots of ire in this thread for a book that anyone has yet to see... i wasn't super impressed with the ToC myself either, but i wasn't super de-pressed either. i think "wait and see; have a look when i see it in the store" is a better attitude to take than getting all upset over the assumptions you've made.

No ire on my part. I gave a quick rundown of my take on the TOC and have the wait and see attitude. However, Mike Mearls bit was completely off to me and perhaps has more 'ire" then my initial post with the ToC. I could see what he's saying, just disagree with it.

Do you have some specifics where you see "ire" outside of the OP?

For me, like others, I'm now wondering, where are the spells? I'm also hoping that we'll some something similiar to campaign components in the next Best of and include things like the Sheen, or the Sunset setting of the Mind Flayers, and perhaps another article to update and expand uses of various technological goodies.

I'm hoping that it seels so well, that we'll see a Best of Dungeon Compendium with the first book featuring Flame and all his incarnations!

 

[Erik Mona]

(1) Statements in this forum and others by the publisher they were taking note of suggestions made and those suggestions to a high degree of uniformity looked for some materials that are not included; and

(2) The publisher continues to hold hostage future volumes predicate upon the good sales of the initial volume which (one must suppose intentionally) left out many of the most desired articles. One must then buy less than the best that people were lead to imagine would be presented in order to get in a future volume what they had hoped and supposed would be in the initial volume. Bait and switch, with the hostage twist, by any other name.

I have hundreds of pages of quality material from the entirety of Dragon's publishing life. Said material would fill seven volumes, minimum, of the size of this first one. There is no way that everyone's favorite articles would appear in the first volume. None. It would have been impossible.

The witch was not included because there is a witch, however lame, already in the core rules of the game. In the Dungeon Master's Guide, in fact. One of the bits of direction we received from Wizards of the Coast was that we could not include any material that had already been included elsewhere. While many long-time readers of the magazine will be chagrinned by the absence of the witch in this volume, I'm sure that if we had included it, there would have been complaints about repetition of material. So it's not included.

Probably the most popular Dragon articles in the history of the magazine, and certainly some of my favorites, were Ed Greenwood's excellent Nine Hells articles. This series comprised three articles, totalling some 52 pages of material. Recall that Ed presented the devils in the first edition style, which is considerably looser than that used for the current edition. More importantly, the current stat block takes up much more room than the first edition version, which means that 52 pages is an extremely conservative estimate of the "footprint" this section would leave upon the Compendium.

I love Ed's devil articles. But I don't love them enough to let them dominate 20% (and probably more) of this book, which is after all aimed at a general audience. For a volume centered on Dragon's excellent planar articles? Sure. And it's our hope that sales of this first volume will allow such a tightly focused compilation in the future.

--Erik Mona
Editor-in-Chief
Dragon & Dungeon

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

They have that. It's called the Artificer.

EDIT:

With a flavor change, if necessary.

/blink

The classes are nothing alike.

 

[Erik Mona]

For me, like others, I'm now wondering, where are the spells? I'm also hoping that we'll some something similiar to campaign components in the next Best of and include things like the Sheen, or the Sunset setting of the Mind Flayers, and perhaps another article to update and expand uses of various technological goodies.

There are only a few spells in the book, and no specific spell section, because while we were waiting for Wizards of the Coast to approve this book's contents, they decided to publish a Spell Compendium of their own, which will include almost all of the spells published in Dragon from the birth of third edition to about issue #323 or so. While it would be cool to rescue some of the 2e and 1e spells from the archive and update them to the latest edition (and I have all of those articles photocopied and ready for just such a project), the budget and schedule for this book did not allow such a massive undertaking. It's definitely something we'll consider for the future, however.

As for the Sheen and the Sunset World, both of them made it to the layout phase of the book, but were ultimately cut for space. I think it's a safe assumption that both articles will appear in an upcoming volume, if such a volume comes to fruition.

--Erik Mona
Editor-in-Chief
Dragon & Dungeon

 

[JoeGKushner]

There are only a few spells in the book, and no specific spell section, because while we were waiting for Wizards of the Coast to approve this book's contents, they decided to publish a Spell Compendium of their own, which will include almost all of the spells published in Dragon from the birth of third edition to about issue #323 or so. While it would be cool to rescue some of the 2e and 1e spells from the archive and update them to the latest edition (and I have all of those articles photocopied and ready for just such a project), the budget and schedule for this book did not allow such a massive undertaking. It's definitely something we'll consider for the future, however.

As for the Sheen and the Sunset World, both of them made it to the layout phase of the book, but were ultimately cut for space. I think it's a safe assumption that both articles will appear in an upcoming volume, if such a volume comes to fruition.

--Erik Mona
Editor-in-Chief
Dragon & Dungeon

No, not the Sheen. Anything but the Sheen! Oh wait... not the Sunset World.... not the Sunset world.... anything but the....

Interesting point on the Spell Compendium bit. I imagine that since a lot of the material (especially seeing as how Ed's Pages From the Mages is popular) was already updated to 3rd ed in one form or another in some places, it'd make updating the spells that weren't even more time consuming as you've not got to check to make sure it's not in another source already.

 

[JoeGKushner]

The witch was not included because there is a witch, however lame, already in the core rules of the game. In the Dungeon Master's Guide, in fact. One of the bits of direction we received from Wizards of the Coast was that we could not include any material that had already been included elsewhere. While many long-time readers of the magazine will be chagrinned by the absence of the witch in this volume, I'm sure that if we had included it, there would have been complaints about repetition of material. So it's not included.

--Erik Mona
Editor-in-Chief
Dragon & Dungeon

This I believe. Saying that it wouldn't be useful like Mike did because it made magic items, I still disagree with.

 

[DungeonmasterCal]

Any chance on putting the Sheen out as a freebie? Pleeeeeze? Although you'd have to try pretty hard to top the conversion on Creature Catalog.

 

[mearls]

It's true that the witch had a lot of focus on creating magic items, but it also had a slew of spells that, even now, are not available in core D&D. Making the class into a core class with lots of bonus magic item creation feats and a unique spell list was what I expected, along with new magical items that anyone, in theory, could make with the right feats.

That's a completely valid approach, but it runs into a few logistical problems.

First, there's the the Spell Compendium. We didn't want to try and cover spells because of that book. Spellcasting classes were an issue for this book because there was a good chance that if we picked up or did a spell, it might show up in the Compendium.

Second, there isn't much design wiggle room between what you outlined and what's already in the books. The wizard gets spells and bonus item creation feats. There's already a sample witch class in the DMG.

Finally, is there room there to do something interesting? It was really interesting to look at how a lot of classics have now been absorbed into core D&D. The witch is a great example of this. The class's main schtick (making items) is now a core part of the game. That was probably the must frustrating part of the project. It came up a lot. In the witch's case, we'd likely end up wandering far from the original concept.

Making some of these classes into prcs is a good idea, but it runs into another issue. Is the archer inspired prc called the archer? Is an archer prestige class really interesting? I suspect that if the prc list had things like "archer" people would have a hard time understanding why it's a prestige class. It just doesn't sound like one.

(Aside: I think that the assassin is a terrible prestige class because it encourages the prc as bundle of special abilities mentality. I have a theory that if the ninja class had kept all its mechancis but been named the assassin, a lot more people would be using it. At the very least, there wouldn't be a knee jerk "Ninjas in Greyhawk?!?!" reaction, something I'm definitely guilty of.)

The big issue with something like the witch is that there's a line between building a whole new class with the same name as an old class, and trying to update something.

In this case, I erred on the side of building new classes out of material that was, at most, skeletal (the mountebank, savant, and other proto-2e classes that EGG wrote about), rather than gutting a fleshed out concept and building a new engine under its skin. That process didn't work out perfectly (I think the battledancer ended up further away from its original mechanics as it went through development), but I think the book is better for it.