Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5298370" data-attributes="member: 4937">Ok.  But I suspect we are just going to have another difference of opinion argument.Let me take a case in point."The Illithiad" is a relatively strong book, but it was also produced in 1998 during the Silver Anniversary flurry of really good stuff that was produced just as TSR was folding.   It was produced by Bruce Cordell who was one of the few good 2e writers, and therefore it falls generally in the class of books I was thinking of when I wrote: "The very best material from that era was produced right near the end."  And, f you'd never bothered to spend much time imagining the Mind Flayers, it was probably a revelatory book.  However, if you'd been playing since the late '70's or early '80's what you instead got was a book that introduced a new origin and mythology for mind flayers which contridicted much or all that had been previously published in Dragon magazine and elsewhere, and which was not particularly more interesting than what you might have expanded upon using that as a basis.  In essence, it is an example of the very retcons you reject elsewhere as excuses to print new material. The Sea Devils contains flashes of useful information, but would be a typical example of exactly the poor production values, poor editting, and unnecessary page bloat jacking up the price that I was complaining about.I'd like to point out that the Sahuagin and the Mindflayers are Gygaxian monsters.  They aren't new creations.  They are just more detail put into someone else's good ideas.  This wasn't so much expanding the value of TSR's intellectual property as it was cashing in on that IP.Spelljammer and Dark Sun were met with derision in the groups I was familiar with.  Spelljammer was classified with joke modules as attempts at humor that had gone awry.  I was always of the impression that setting flopped.Dark Sun seemed moderately more successful, at least if the marketting then and nostalgia now is to be believed, but in the groups I played with the fact that everyone was psionic, play started at 3rd level, and you could play tri-kin caused it to classified generally with the trend toward more and more munchkin settings.  We never got hooked into it, spent most of the time we poured through its contents laughing at it, and rightly or wrongly the adventures and novels tie ins were classified unread as likely to be poorly written railroads along the lines terrible FR dreck being churned out at the time.  I couldn't tell you the name of one Dark Sun module, and I've never seen them repeatedly (or ever) listed when someone at EnWorld asks people to name their favorite adventures.I admired Planescape as a setting and as an excercise in creative writing, but I never wanted to play there, nor did I ever buy any of the product.  Many people found it very offputting, and while I disagree, I can also easily see why.  I get that entirely.Yes, they could.  I didn't deny that.  Bruce, Monte, Skip and a few others were doing excellent work especially right near the end.</blockquote>

Verification