This pseudo-chapter follows the earlier Tome formats in being collected essays about the mechanics and world-building of D&D 3.5. The topics of focus mainly concern character advancement, gold and treasure, and other subjects of material substance such as traps and constructs.
We first start off with
Character Advancement: Power and Wealth, which discusses how experience points are a flawed concept because they encourage anti-climactic grindy behavior:
No one wants to hear about the time you threw a cloud kill into a Satyr tavern and then teleported home so that you could try out the new spells that appeared in your book because you just dinged to 10th level. That's a story that is dumb, and the current rules pretty much expect you to do it over and over again. If we're going to have a rational system for magic items, we can't have it work that way.
This is a bit of a strawman; leveling up is typically not done right in the middle of a session, and the "kill everyone in a tavern" veers close to murderhobo stuff and is usually part of a "let's not make evil-aligned characters" that are a common social contract.
Moving on, the authors outline their primary design goals and solutions: eliminating wealth by level and encounter-based experience points. For the latter, they provide four alternative means of advancement: "serial heroism" where PCs only ever play at one level or a narrow range of power, another where PCs don't gain levels but instead gain major magic items as power advancement, a third where PCs level up every session, and the fourth which is…well it doesn't sound like a solution so much as a complaint.
Attenuating Advancement: Diminished Returns.
"You youngsters have no concept of how difficult it was to get the Doom Glaive."
If one considers advancement at face value: a direct method to prevent adventuring from becoming "stale", then it is entirely reasonable to question its inclusion in the game at all. After all, a sixth level party could very plausibly encounter a manticore, a summoning ooze, a dragon, a war party of ogres, a troll, an evil wizard, a dinosaur, a nymph, a mud salad, a nerra facechanger, a medusa, a circle of myconid, a cathedral protected by a stained glass golem, a cadre of yak folk, an infestation of ash rats, a room full of hammerers, a spawn of Kyuss, or a dreadful cleric with some orcish minions. Or whatever. The point is, you could very plausibly face different opposition every week until half the players move out of town before you ever run out of monsters to fight. The staleness then comes not at the hands of the players in any case, but for the DM. After all, once the DM has thrown the adventure where an ancient cathedral of Pelor has been taken over by an evil group of Yak Folk who have bound a Janni and forced her to tell them the secret password that allows them to break into the inner cloister without having the stained glass tear itself out of the wall and attack them in order to conduct a foul ritual to transform the daughter of the old king into a medusa and set up some zombie ogres to protect themselves while the mighty ritual commences, that leaves some of the DM's favorite monsters used up out of that level. More importantly however, the players are presenting essentially the same skill set so long as their skill set doesn't change, meaning that the DM can become bored finding challenges for the PCs unless the PCs demonstrably change over time.
Be that as it may, the fact is that higher level characters with more magical swag have more abilities than do lower level characters and quite definitely present a face to team monster with more attachments on their Swiss Army knives.
Run-on sentences make my eyes itch.
Thoughts: I understand how the concept of experience points, which are mostly gained via combat, can be counterintuitive to a lot of classic fantasy adventures. I personally feel that these essays and solutions are too wordy yet also simplistic. Is it that hard to just go "you level up at the speed of plot?" Or maybe something akin to World of Darkness, where "you level up via Accomplishments, and you gain Accomplishments via in-game actions such as defeating a major foe or resolving a personal quest?"
As for eliminating Wealth by Level, the Wish economy already kind of does this by locking 15k+ magic items behind stuff that can't be bought with gold. But I find the explanation given to be flawed:
This hurts a lot of people, but it's true. If you can turn a pile of silver into increases to your natural armor bonus, the setting is going to be destroyed. Quite literally, and with crowbars. Fantasy settings are filled with bridges made of opal and castles faced with blue ice that sty forever cold and stuff. This fantastic scenery is awesome, and it contributes to the feel of fantasy that should permeate the cooperative stories we tell within a D&D game. If player character power is determined by wealth" in any directly measurable fashion, you can bank on PCs ripping all the expensive facing off the castles they conquer - and then we all lose.
See, it's pragmatic and even sort of reasonable to rip the marble off the Great Pyramid at Giza and use it to build fancy houses in Cairo. But for all the future generations, it sucks. There really is a correlation here: if we don't allow people to trade blocks of marble for extra spells per day and more powerfully magical swords, then people will leave our pyramids alone. Otherwise, future generations will look at another unfaced ziggurat and wonder what wonders the ancient battlefields possessed before vandals came and destroyed our fantasy world.
Thoughts: Remember the "Rules as a physics engine" mantra I touched upon in the OP? The above quote primarily covers PC behavior, but there's still going to be NPCs in the world who never interact with the Wish Economy. Who still have their own incentives to adventure and delve into risky dungeons. Pyramid marble may not net you a Holy Avenger, but they can help feed your family, or buy Potions of Remove Disease or Restoration. The Tomes offer a solution, but that solution only goes so far in regards to consistent world-building.
The next essay is for
Crafting, and is practically incomplete besides giving out a list of nerfs to the Craft skill. However, the starting paragraph on Crafting is particularly poignant and what I will be focusing on:
A.3.1 Why a Revision to the Crafting Rules?
An overhaul to the Craft rules may sound fairly unbalancing, as the current Craft rules were created to prevent characters from making a lot of money and potentially destabilizing their games with an influx of magic items.
Unfortunately, like Level Allowance, the heavy nerfing to Crafting resulted in a lot of characters simply becoming unviable, a lot of very dumb things happening all around, and it still doesn't actually stop characters from breaking the game if they really want to. If the party is made out of Elves, they can simply set a single skill rank on fire and announce that they're going to spend 100 years farming, making trained Profession (Farmer) checks every week. That'll get them about 6 gp a week for the next 5,200 weeks for a total of 31,200 gp at 1st level before they even start adventuring. And as elves, they can honestly just spend 200 years farming or spend some real skill ranks on that to get even more money.
Oh boy, do I have
Thoughts on this one!
This is perhaps one of the more infamous statements of Frank and Keith, but I actually like it. I like it because it is perhaps the most succinct means of understanding the game design philosophy of Frank Trollman and Keith Kaczmarek, and by extension much of the Gaming Den.
In 99% of gaming tables, this situation would be handled via an out-of-game social contract. It's quite clear that the players aren't interested in going on adventures and want to play tabletop Stardew Valley instead. But the Tome Authors phrase this not as a problem of different expectations or what happens when players don't want to play the DM's game, but a fault of the game system itself. This ties back to
Rule #1 covered in my OP: "Game mechanics must be followed to the letter, irrespective of the spirit of the rules." Presuming that the Dungeon Master has no choice but to go along ties into
Rule #3, "Favoritism of players in the social contract." Ironically it contradicts
Rule #4, "Avoidance of Magical Tea Party," for players going off to endlessly roll Profession Farmer checks for a century without anything of substance happening is doing a lot of heavy lifting of everything going exactly as planned for the PCs.
It also ties into
Rule #5, "Rules as a physics engine," where the game continues outside of gameplay. No rational gaming group would let a player go
"hold on, let me roll the dice 5,000+ times to see how much money I make" during an actual session. Much less have a player be taken seriously if they say
"trust me bro, I legitimately got 31k of gold by endlessly rolling before our first session, pinky promise!" The statement of
"still doesn't actually stop characters from breaking the game if they want to" is a clear example of
Rule #7, "Anti-social behavior should be dealt with in-game and not out of-out-character," by laying the blame at D&D's crafting subsystem rather than players clearly uninterested in playing D&D.
It also prominently showcases
Rule #6, Selective Realism, for all that gold isn't just going to sit around, especially by farmers in a feudal society. What about taxes, upkeep, livestock, etc? The Tome authors presume that these elf farmers didn't spend a single copper piece on living expenses in all that time.
Outside of the Gaming Den, such an example would be viewed as ludicrous. It was even made fun of in places. But inside the Den, nobody really did so to my knowledge. If this was my first exposure to the Tomes and their authors, I'd come away with the conclusion that its writers haven't actually played Dungeons & Dragons, or any tabletop games at all for that matter, as it's such an absurd strawman.
But the funniest thing of all is that the quoted hypothetical isn't even a weakness of the crafting system.
Frank and Keith are talking about Profession, a different skill entirely!
The next series of essays concerns traps, entitled
Dangerous Locations: When the Floor has a CR. There's a lot of talk about how traps should be treated as a pseudo-opponent by incorporating them into "encounters per day" setups. There's also a list of common trap triggers, and a
very liberal interpretation of the Disable Device skill:
So what counts as a device? Well. . . everything. Every mechanical or magical effect is a device. A wall of force is a device as is a giant stone block that is set to fall down on a foolish intruder who breaks a trip wire. A character with sufficient Disable Device can successfully turn off any magical effect or prevent virtually any cause and effect chain from occurring. You can stop an avalanche (DC 15) even after it has begun (DC 35). You can remove any permanent magic effect, even curses like cause blindness (DC 32). What you can't do is disable instantaneous effects. Flesh to stone, therefore, is out of bounds for disabling, as is wall of stone. Sorry, once an instantaneous effect has gone off, there's nothing left to disable.
How does that work? I have no frickin idea. Rogues, Thief Acrobats, Ninjas, and Gadgeteers are capable of simply turning off geas and there's no physical explanation for how it is that they do it. The fact is that most of the devices in D&D are beyond my understanding. I don't know how a symbol of death works, I don't know how the magical energies stay in place for weeks or years until activated, so I don't know how a Ninja goes about making those magical energies dissipate harmlessly without entering the kill zone. I do know that he can do it, and if required I can make something up that sounds cool. That's a DM's job, after all.
Thoughts: I find it hilarious that the authors take such a broad interpretation of trap-disabling that it effectively becomes a magical superpower, but can't even think of what the effect would look like flavor-wise in-universe.
The next essay is mostly complaining about the vague wording of Illusion magic in D&D, but the several sets of essays that have actual solutions primarily concern
Magic Items. Notably the authors make several changes, such as an 8 item limit for magic items with constant effects to avoid the
Magic Item Christmas Tree effect, and also eliminating static bonuses which instead are based on character level. Therefore, a low-level PC wearing a Ring of Protection will have that item's AC bonus increase with them in level, rather than forcing them to give it up and swap it out for another like it's clothing going out of style. For more specific enhancement effects, these are divided into Lesser, Moderate, and Greater Qualities, although the list is extremely incomplete in comparison to what's available in base 3.5.
Treasure and the World primarily concerns valuable stuff for adventurers that aren't magic items. It mostly goes in-depth into the three Economics (Turnip, Gold, & Wish), but also presents a new treasure type: Books. Books can be compiled into a Library, and if you have enough books on a particular subject (doesn't say how many) then you can take 20 on relevant Knowledge checks. And books pertaining to specific subjects can be studied in an hour and let a character make a Knowledge check even if they are untrained. It says that books can be used to make checks with lower DCs, but no examples are given. We do get a table of 100 books with titles sounding like stuff you'd find in a D&D setting, such as
Book of the Wars of Pelor or
Fairy Courts: Sun and Shadow.
Thoughts: Books as treasure is a very cool concept; even more so having said books provide a tangible in-game benefit. I wish more D&D-alike RPGs did this kind of thing. 2024 5e now has something like this, where Books are now PHB equipment that can grant +5 on a relevant knowledge-based skill check.
As for the
Three (or so) Economies, they're generally much wordier essays on the overviews I gave them in my Chapter 8 post, such as talking about the average caloric intake of a feudal Japanese farmer. Or that most magic item crafters in the Gold economy only make more expensive magic items for non-monetary reasons, as it's more financially viable to make a bunch of cheaper to produce magic items and sell those instead.
Image is a Robo-Scorpion from Fallout: New Vegas.
Created Monsters: Forged and Bred is the final section of the Book of Gears, mostly talking about Construct monsters. We first start out with an essay on how Vermin in D&D settings
aren't actually natural animals because their stat blocks don't adhere to real-world biology:
Ants track by smell and follow trails left by other ants and bees see deep into the ultraviolet spectrum and perceive a beautiful tapestry of gorgeous colors that escape the eye of the man and the mouse. And when dealing with Vermin type creatures that all means precisely nothing, because Vermin in D&D don't do any of that. It's not because the scent ability was left off the Monstrous Ant description, it's because the Ant described in the Monster Manual genuinely doesn't have a good sense of smell. It does have Darkvision out to 60 feet like an outsider or a Construct, and that's not an accident either despite the fact that Earthly ants really demonstrably don't do that regardless of size.
The Monstrous Scorpion isn't a super sized scorpion at all. It has a set of abilities which are on the face of it completely bizarre from the context of what actual scorpions do, because it's actually a living construct created by a long fallen empire for use in war. That's why it's immune to hallucinatory poisons and can see in perfect darkness.
It's actually created from biomass by powerful magic and not by the interaction of natural and magical mutation across a thousand generations and a harsh selection process hastened by unpredictable climate and predation by manticores.
There's more to the entry than this, notably talking about hooks for who made the vermin or using alchemy to brew scents to effectively give them orders. But I wanted to focus on the quoted section due to my thoughts below.
Thoughts: The quoted entry is a stellar example of not only Selective Realism, but another favorite of the Tomes: unintended world-building consequences!
For you see, Vermin don't just cover giant and "monstrous" versions of bugs and insects, but also mundane varieties as well.
A Locust Swarm is of the Vermin type. You know, the kind you summon with Insect Plague?
By applying this universal change, the Tomes effectively made it so that the most common type of animal in Material Plane ecosystems never need to eat, sleep, or breath. And since they're artificial, that brings the inevitable question of whether or not they are digestible by their common predators such as the ant-eater.
Look, I get it. Frank and Keith know a thing or two about ants, so when they see something in an RPG that brushes up against their suspension of disbelief regarding ants, they want to rework it in a way that feels more plausible to them. But the thing is, most tabletop game designers aren't zoologists, so there's inevitably going to be these kinds of errors. For instance,
gorillas in real life cannot swim due to their physiology, but in 3.5 their
high Strength scores and the
low DC to swim even in rough water makes the opposite true. That doesn't mean that we need to turn all apes in a setting into robots,* but it does show the impracticality of Frank and K's design. If we really want to be consistent regarding bugs in D&D, we'll now have to think about and rework the entire animal kingdom and agriculture, especially given that farmers can't use poison anymore to deal with insect infestations!
*unless we really want to for a cool adventure!
The next sections concern a rework of
Constructs as a creature type: the most notable changes are that ones built by characters to follow them around count as a bonded item for the 8 Item Limit, and also Constructs can be affected by Necromancy spells via plausible-sounding explanations. For instance, using Magic Jar to bind a soul into a mobile statue, or using ability damage to slow down a construct made of lumber. We also get a new stat block for Simulacrums, which are CR 3 monsters who mostly specialize in social skills and fight with Glamerswords which are identical to longswords, and their only feat is Impersonation which doesn't appear in this book at all. Our final entry talks about Modrons, and how the authors feel that they are a great representation of Law. The Modrons have a Big Plan, but the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. Lower-ranking Modrons are purposefully kept in the dark and only ever informed and taught enough for their assigned tasks and nothing more. This makes Modrons very efficient in certain circumstances, but also very exploitable.
Thoughts: I presume that the Simulacrum spell is intended to be much lower level, as a CR 3 entity for a 7th level spell slot is rather unimpressive. I feel that making Constructs vulnerable to Necromancy spells opens up a can of worms for unintended consequences. What happens when you animate the corpse of an Iron Golem? They're still immune to conventional poison and disease, so this doesn't close up the "insecticides don't work in Tome D&D" flaw that I pointed out earlier.
Tudor Town Square by Ferdinand Ladera
At a mere 5 pages, this Appendix covers a rework to the skill rules, with a sidebar mentioning that they're made redundant with the skill bonuses from magic items in the Book of Gears. It mainly goes over 3.5's weak spots, such as how certain skills are intrinsically more valuable than others and how easy it is to break the RNG with even moderate optimization. The solutions aren't a wholesale rework, instead looking over individual skills and rebalancing them. For example, Diplomacy checks are now opposed by the influenced party rolling d20 + character level + Wisdom modifier, and their current attitude imposes a modifier against the Diplomancer's roll. Or how Sleight of Hand can be used to draw and sheathe weapons more quickly and without provoking opportunity attacks.
Thoughts: I don't really have any strong thoughts on the skill reworks, to be honest.
Thoughts So Far: While the Book of Gears is technically incomplete, it was posted for general use and is meant to be applicable with the rest of the Tomes. And the material within is still worthy of being covered and criticized. In an odd way, the Frank and K Tomes ending here was probably for the best, for I noticed an observable downgrade in quality. Their essays felt wordier and rantier but didn't have as much in the way of solutions, like with covering Illusion's shortcomings. Then there's that Elf Farmer pseudo-problem, or the Birds Aren't Real but for insects, which creates a whole new set of suspension of disbelief-breaking problems that it was originally supposed to solve.
I think that the Tomes ending on a high note helped cement the authors' 15 minutes of fame in the D&D optimization community. If they continued working, I fear we would've gotten the 3.5 version of the Bane Guard, and nobody wants to see that!
Final Thoughts: The Tomes aren't just a collection of house rules to patch up holes in the foundation of 3rd Edition, they're an explicit mission call into ramping up the "rules as physics" interpretation of 3.5 by carrying the system mechanics to their logical conclusions. As a hobbyist world-builder, I like this kind of stuff:
I made a project that lasted nearly a year all about how a nation of D&D monsters would apply their natural abilities and talents into economic power. Or doing homebrew of alternate Dragonlance timelines,
like how widespread teaching of wizardry would be best leveraged in daily life beyond adventuring. So you'd think that something like the Frank & K Tomes would be just my jam.
But they're not. When I first ran a game with the Tomes way back when, it went fine. I liked several of the various house rules and new content, but it wasn't a major change to how I played 3.5 like Tome of Battle did for martial characters. Or when it came to innovative interpretations of the kind of world the 3.5 system could create, like for Eberron and Ptolus. It didn't even rank as one of my all-time favorite pieces of content for said Edition.
I didn't have a bad time, but I was still quite let down since the authors and Gaming Den really hyped it up. Not only that, but when you spend much of your free time engaging in histrionics tearing down the work of everyone else, you're actually holding yourself to nigh-impossible standards. To one of the Tome authors, Eberron isn't just a missed opportunity, it's a
"basic failure of a setting" that isn't any different than generic fantasy such as the Forgotten Realms. Apocalypse World isn't just a game with a core resolution mechanic that's too broad and vague,
its creators are disgusting people* encouraging players to sexually harass others at the table via Sex Moves. Richard Thomas of Onyx Path Publishing is
an exploitative one-man-operation profiting off of desperate fans, but is also somehow bad for
continuing to publish books so that his employees can maintain steady jobs.**
*For context, the poster silva is a big fan of Apocalypse World engine games and praised them frequently on the Gaming Den. This caused much of the forum to hate him.
**And according to one RPGnet poster,
the linked review got basic facts wrong about both Exalted and its publishing company.
If one is continuously insistent that wide swathes of well-regarded and popular games and their creators are hopelessly untalented or even morally repugnant,
people are going to expect you as a critic to be free of the very flaws you point out in others when engaging in your own game design. While these examples primarily use Frank, Keith still seemed fine associating with him to the very end via the linked 2019 Exalted review, so I can't help but feel there's a certain level of silent endorsement from him as well.
Beyond just the past several posts' worth of criticisms on my front, I think one of the major problems with the Tomes boils down to the fact that Frank Trollman and Keith Kaczmarek strike me as fundamentally incurious people. The authors find a flaw in the game system or the fantasy world-building and offer up a solution, but frequently fail to build upon its larger implications in both actual gameplay crunch and worldbuilding fluff. Much of their game design begins and ends at "this is a dumb rule, here's how I'd do it" before moving on to the next thing. They switch the old gears out for fancy new ones, but don't give it a spin to see how the rest of the cogs start moving. It's how you can end up spending dozens of pages complaining about D&D's wonky monetary system while also saying that economics is pseudoscience. Or acknowledge that gamers get really upset and game tables break up over the ethics of killing monster children, and then say that it's actually unimportant without explaining why. The various character options are littered with powers that can significantly alter not just adventurer resource management, but can also be used to change the average setting's standard of living beyond the personal level. But such innovations are cast down by the Tomes as projects inevitable to fail, for the Great Men of History haven't yet written the philosophical treatises to uplift society from the Dung Ages. As though D&D's many settings weren't already full of super-intelligent beings possessed of altruistic visions spanning multiple lifetimes, ones who are just one Contact Outer Plane or Commune spell away from communicating with mortals. Much less have adventures and tales ripe for PCs who very much could rise to be those Great Men.
I get the feeling that Frank and Keith look at immersive video game RPGs such as Skyrim or the immense world-building in Tolkien, and feel that D&D can be so much more than a string of dungeon-crawls and fight scenes. But they don't care to understand why real or fictional people might act the way they act, or can have different viewpoints and opinions than their own perspectives without being bad-faith or unintelligent. To me, this results in the Tomes being something less like an Elder Scrolls game and more like Minecraft: an expansive and beautiful, yet flat and surface-level theme park ride with huge, intricate monuments of builds and rules crunch. But then you see the villagers walking around, and realize that they feel off and the limits of their interaction are making Squidward sighs and trading turnips for priceless emeralds. And they don't even have the facsimile of talking about sweet rolls or why they gave up on adventuring!
Just like how Frank and Keith's own Selective Realism can't sustain the idea of insects with darkvision or material components being in-jokes, I can't sustain the idea of a world whose people just can't possibly grok fiat currency without also conceiving of nation-states. Or ambitious PCs not using their personal power and resources to give better lives to the commoners and enact social change because "feudal people are dumb and republicanism doesn't exist yet." It is an ultimately subjective taste, yes, but it also speaks to how the Tomes were never going to be an all-in-one fix to 3.5, for even fans of the same game can end up wanting very things in what direction their desired system changes should go.
The Tome Fandom: a Postmortem Analysis
Image is Plague Doctor by Kozlik Kristian
So, how successful were the Tomes in their mission statement? Well, that's entirely subjective, for the Tomes were correct in identifying the symptoms of many problems in 3rd Edition. However, many of its proposed fixes end up opening other holes in the vessel, so it really comes down to what broken aspects the reader is willing to tolerate. There's also the fact that the Tomes weren't written for a general audience: it was written first and foremost by Character Optimizers who sought to manage the game around a tier of play that most players did not find of interest. Planar Binding efreet to gain the most powerful spell in the game extra-early is a neat exploit, and makes for a novel world-building thought experiment like the
Tippyverse. But like the Tippyverse, many people wouldn't want it to be the standard expectation for a D&D game. There's also the fact that several consistent problems permeate the Tomes, such as the authors expecting readers to understand and agree with them for more vague and subjective things, or the lack of DMing advice for rebalancing encounters for Tome PCs. This makes the content not very user-friendly as a set of house rules.
I've seen people attribute the Tome's fading popularity in the wider D&D fandom as being part of its unfinished status, the behavior of its authors, or the fandom's self-isolating nature. But I believe that these explanations miss the forest for the trees, for I've seen other ttrpgs with such problems yet still survive. The fading I believe can be attributed to the inability of sustained positivity and engagement within the fanbase.
While even the Gaming Denizens are aware of their acerbic nature in the wider tabletop fandom, one would think that they would wish to engage with the rest of the hobby in order to spread awareness of the homebrew they exalt. Trollman and Kaczmarek are perfectly fine with others building upon their rules, and deliberately kept the Tomes free in order to reach as wide an audience as possible, so there's no difficulties in finances or production. To hear many of their forum regulars, one would get the sense that they're a light in the darkness of the tabletop fandom: the Tomes are an unfinished yet workable version of Dungeons & Dragons in a sea of failure, with the majority of gamers unknowing or willfully ignorant to content themselves with inferior-quality games. The Gaming Den aren't the only highly opinionated nerd communities in town, but even then such groups usually spend a significant amount of time talking about, playing, and developing the games they like. So what about the Den?
The last revision of the Tomes were in 2010, but the Gaming Den forums persisted on as a community for about a decade before falling apart at the seams due to political infighting. But in all that time, they spent much more energy on talking about other games than the Tomes, usually to snark and mock but with some rare moments of positivity. And while the Tomes themselves had homebrew contributions, there was overall a distinct lack of…energy. There were no real attempts to reach outside the community and showcase the work's high points, nor was there a push to "prettify" the series with artwork and fancy formatting, nor to host Actual Play sessions on social media, streaming services, or convention events of what a Tome session looks like. If the Gaming Den truly believed that Trollman and Kaczmarek were the next Greg Stafford or Mike Pondsmith,* they would be putting in the effort to showcase this to the masses. Their enthusiastic discussion of the Tomes and related homebrew should be on par with, if not outweigh, the many, many threads complaining about "failed designs" and "terrible game mechanics" over the years.
*And probably exceed them, given the Den's contempt for the vast majority of tabletop.
It's one thing to have snooty opinions towards more "juvenile" RPGs. Lord knows one could make all sorts of White Wolf jokes about this attitude! But Vampire and Exalted fans are passionate about their favorite RPGs, and taking a peek into their online and offline fan communities can see a thriving scene of continual discussion and engagement by creators and fans alike who keep their games going strong even between long periods of unpublished material.
I did not see this in the Tome fandom's middle and later years. Enthusiasm for the series seems to have dried up a long time ago, even when its authors were still regular posters. Go on over to the
In the Trenches subforum on the Gaming Den, which hosts their Actual Plays and Looking For Group threads. You'll see the first several pages dominated by non-Tome games, with Tome games evaporating past 2016. While there were attempts to finish the Tomes by other posters, such projects never got going for various reasons.
But what is most tragic is that the Gaming Den's metaphorical raising of the drawbridge is that they let much of the rest of the tabletop industry pass them by. Many problems of D&D pointed out in the Tome series and the broader critical analysis sphere have since been solved and standardized: 4th and 5th Edition defanged alignment of its mechanical focus, making it easier than ever to treat it as a rarely-thought of background element. The Pathfinder designers,
one of whom once claimed Linear Warriors Quadratic Wizards was the fault of the players and not the system, have since realized these balance issues and made a 2nd Edition that rewards tactical gameplay and appeals to robust character creation options while giving each class a distinct role and place at the table. The increasing acceptance of X-cards, lines and veils, and Session 0 have been indispensable in rooting out problem players and power-tripping DMs, allowing gamers better tools than the Den's failed tactics of "how can we alter the rules to prevent the DM's abuse of authority?"
In a less negative space, they might take solace in the fact that D&D and the wider tabletop fandom has made steps towards a vision closer to theirs. But in their anger they could not see this, or at least didn't wish to acknowledge it. They thought that the world outside their walls and moat is a desolate land, when in reality the rest of the gaming world is lush and thriving.
Dragonlance Key of Destiny Adventure Path: DL's only 3rd edition AP going from 1st to 20th level. My white whale of reviews, it was my very first reviewed product online but I stopped due to fatigue.
Elder Evils: The last 3.5 book published, a collection of world-ending threats to be BBEGs.
Midnight 2nd Edition Core Book: 3rd party campaign setting strongly inspired by Lord of the Rings, is basically "dark fantasy where Sauron won"
Monte Cook Presents Iron Heroes: Actually written by Mike Mearls, it was a rules variant for imagining 3.5 as a low-magic world where the PCs were primarily amazing martial characters.
Monte Cook’s World of Darkness: Monte Cook's world of darkness homebrew setting. As is to be expected, Mages break the game.
Spycraft 2.0: Like D20 Modern, but better balanced and designed.
True Sorcery: Green Ronin's "build your own spells on the fly" variant magic system.
Zelda D20: A very in-depth homebrew on running games set in the worlds of the Tri-Force.
