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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9074480" data-attributes="member: 27780">Living Greyhawk Journal 00: August 2000part 3/4Wheels within Wheels: Since they’re our cover stars, it’s no surprise that the real meat of this issue is an 8 page (of course!) article on the history of the Circle of Eight. They’ve been going for a good 30 years now both IC and OOC in various incarnations. Originally a group of (mostly) heroic adventurers of all classes, they’ve wound up becoming more of the Mordenkainen show, plus whatever wizards are currently following him and his credo of militant neutrality at the moment. Most of the spellcasters who have spells named after them in the PHB have been members at one point or another. (which means the state of magical knowledge on Oerth has advanced dramatically in a single generation, so much for being a static pseudomedieval setting) They’ve certainly had their setbacks, all being killed 10 years ago by Vecna (but brought back by cloning) and then betrayed by Rary during the wars 8 years ago, but the organisation as a whole survives and the average level of the members continues to rise. All 9 current members are named, Bigby, Drawmij, Nystul, Otto, Mordenkainen himself and 4 newbies who stick out like sore thumbs, with a completely different naming convention, making it obvious that while they are trying to incorporate lore from the old days, the current writers can’t even remotely match it’s tone with their new characters. All are high level single-class generalist wizards, (apart from Otto, who has a few cleric levels) with no specialists, sorcerers, prestige classes or any of the other interesting things you can do with class builds in 3e. Although the edition change is upon us, this shows that the staff writers still haven’t remotely caught up with it’s possibilities, still building the characters in the old AD&D way where you pick a class and usually stick with it until death/retirement and even specialists have stringent ability score requirements that make most people not bother. If they’d done this a few years later, they’d look a lot more interesting mechanically and have incorporated the things described in the backstories into the mechanics (it says he’s a Loremaster right there! Surely you know about that prestige class at least?! ) So this is very interesting article of much greater ambition and significance than usual, but I can easily see ways it could have been improved on both a fluff and mechanics level in hindsight. Departing from canon for your home game is definitely of use here.</blockquote>

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