FR Player's Guide

[That One Guy]

I suspect that a context tends to bring out the best flavour writing.

I hope you're right. One of the things I dislike the most about 4e is the flavour text.

Anduhh... from the July Previews and Beyond [sblock]Classes: An entirely new class and new multiclass-only class (available to characters who have a spellscar, a mark that is the corroded echo of spellfire twisted by the disaster that was the Spellplague), as well as new paragon paths and an epic destiny.[/sblock]

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Think back to 3E, and the FRCS and MoF contained a lot of inspired PRCs, items and spells with a flavour that you didn't really see in some other books when it was a case of writing crunch for crunch's sake. Or at least, that's the impression I got.

1E and 2E had actually more inspired items and spells by quite a large margin, when it came to the FR. But 3E's weren't bad.

I actually thought 3E FR was the absolute poster-boy for "crunch for crunch's sake" and "totally unecessary" PrCs. That said, you're right that a lot of the PrCs did have a "Realmsian" feeling in their naming and abilities (that's easy to emulate but hard to describe), where many other PrCs in other products had a bizarre "mega-generic" feel that meant that they didn't seem to quite fit in anywhere (least of all Greyhawk).