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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gus L" data-source="post: 9555991" data-attributes="member: 7045072">Thanks for finding this thing. I took a look at the three books, and while some of the basic ideas seem interesting enough as a sword & sorcery/pulp fantasy style setting there was also a lot ... and a lot of it seemed pretty mediocre and it has that 2E/3E quality of just being too much.  Rules and options maximalism. Not something I would use now, but were I playing much in 92-93, it would have seemed pretty cool.It reminds me in a way of my personal favorite late TSR bit of unremembered content: Dragon Mountain ... an enormous boxed set mega-dungeon (with a rather extensive 2e railroad style intro). I should add that at the time it was well received, was reprinted in 2018, and won awards, but I don't ever hear about it these days. From the Wikipedia article on Dragon Mountain you can get an idea of the scope:<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Mountain_(Dungeons_%26_Dragons)" target="_blank">"The box includes six poster-sized maps, half of which are tactical displays of village and battlefield settings, while the rest detail the three-levels of the mountain's interior. Six cardstock mini-maps show self-contained sections of the mountain that can be attached to the poster maps at various locations or simply set aside."</a>Of course when you actually read dragon mountain it's so big that the keys can't catch up to these poster sized maps. So what you get is a series of humanoid lairs. It's a scope vs. content issue that one sees in most really large mega-dungeons, but in Dragon Mountain at least the humanoids have actual factions that a party could exploit... I think Arden Vul is the only thing that gets close to sufficient conceptual density and content for this scale ... and well ... Arden Vul is a unique thing. Anyway...I think a bit about the mid-90's era of D&D and how it's sort of both the natural evolution of what I see as the TSR Gygax/sensibility in game design - adding more, making rules more granular, always seeming to aim towards a complete fantasy world simulation rather then a "game".  There's something appealing about it, but I suspect that in practice it leads to all the cliches about bad 90's heartbreaker games...</blockquote>

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