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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charles Rampant" data-source="post: 7078649" data-attributes="member: 32659">I'm forever delving into 2e books when writing my games - Forgotten Realms setting stuff, Planescape Guides for planar adventures - and I agree that the quality of writing and ideas could be very high indeed. Like 3e it also tended to have a lot of really tedious rules stuff sprinkled in, down to telling you which magical items the owner of the Way Inn had on his person. However, there is also this unbelievable quantity of stuff as well, including two separate lines for describing the same places in Faerun (The Savage North, Volo's Guide to the North). All in, it makes a wonderful resource to selectively dip into for 5e purposes, since the quantity of system crunch is lower than in 3e (laden with prestige classes and feeling the need to stat up every NPC) and 4e (battlemaps). (I can't speak to 1e, as the only stuff I've looked at is Tales from the Yawning Portal adventures, and Waterdeep and the North, a book that managed to not be invalidated by subsequent releases on the same subject.) It might have been a disaster for TSR and retailers at the time, as they flooded the market with stuff, in what looks now like a company attempting to provide every conceivable option for fantasy roleplaying simultaneously, but great for bolstering 5e releases.You can also tell that Wizards can afford to be very light with their current Faerun setting stuff because of that prior deluge. Not much in Storm King's Thunder, Murder in Baldur's Gate, or Princes of the Apocalypse outright contradicts prior material; it updates the names of humans, but strives to ensure that a prominent shop or tavern named in a previous edition still exists and still sells the same sort of things, that villages are still in the same place and have the same character, and that no dramatic shifts in the power balance of the setting have taken place. In other words, if you want to know more, you can very easily pick up a 2e book and use it in your game. I can usually use 5e stuff and 2e stuff simultaneously without too much trouble, only needing to choose which Duke of Daggerford is currently ruling, who the Open Lord of Waterdeep is, and which bartender is behind the bar of the Three Kegs. Those institutions all still exist, and very few major changes can be observed between the two editions. Happily players never remember names anyway, so inconsistencies are no worries <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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