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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Estlor" data-source="post: 2115065" data-attributes="member: 7261">Eh... yes and no.  The Bruce Heard articles have very OD&D-centric themes and occurences.  They did very little to tinker with the basic rules of OD&D.  No guns.  The Red Curse weakened you with no real gain in power as an offset, but it also didn't make you freakishly deformed in the least.  IIRC, cinnabryl still warded off all its effects.  They added in the lupin, rakasta, and half-elf as playable races (with the half-elf found only in Eusdria, a sort of pseudo-viking nation if you brought the vikings forward to a more modern mindset). When they moved the Savage Coast to 2e, they worked in more 2e related things.  There were kits (which included the first instance of how to become an inheritor, a concept largely left out of Bruce Heard's treatment), psionics as an option (at least optional enough that they told you the level-limits of the various races if they became a psionicist), and wheel lock pitols (that only worked in the area of the Red Curse because they used vermiel, a side-effect of the Curse, as an ingredient in smokepowder).  The Curse stopped being debilitating and started being a trade-off.  Now you lost points in an ability score, but gained some sort of minor magical power in return.  If you failed to wear cinnabryl, you would eventually mutated into a freakish deformity that related to the minor magical power you gained.  Likewise, more detail was placed into explaining the "why" of the Red Curse.  Its origin and the explaination of its effects was spelled out explicitly to the DM. Later, when they made Red Steel into the Savage Coast Odyssey line, they worked up the Orc's Head Penninsula and Nimmur, two regions previously untouched.  Lots of monsters (some OD&D updates, some completely new) were made for the region.  If I can be blunt and somewhat snide in response to this, the earlier version came first and wasn't part of 2e.  In other words, there's no reason the earlier version is better. Yes, the Red Curse was (for all purposes) drug use when presented in Dragon Magazine.  However, it was a stupid penalty with no trade-off.  All it did was encourage people NOT to stay in the Savage Coast for more than a one-off adventure.  Stay too long and your ability scores begin to wither away with nothing to show for it.  The only saving grace it had was the area the Curse touched was very small and very contained.  The leap to 2e kept the damage the Curse did to your ability scores but instead gave you a return for the investment.  Okay, maybe there was the implication in Bruce Heard's work that ingesting the vermeil was the reason you suffered from the Curse (something that was later dropped in favor of the Curse being an ambient magical effect centered on the region), but aside from an origin rethinking, it has very similar mechanical effects on a character.  I'll gladly take that adjustment as the jump to 2e also greatly expanded the flavor of the region, making it less of a comical parody of a Western movie (Sir John of the Wayne, "the Duke" of Cimmaron County not withstanding) and more of a swashbuckling realm of intrigue.  The introduction of Inheritor orders and the politics between them, the "new world" aspect of unexplained Oltec ruins and artifacts turning up, and the strong Spanish/Portugueese flavor (including a nation that mirrors Spain during the Inquisition) adds a lot to the setting.  The threat of war is imminent in the Savage Baronies, Renardy and Bellayne bicker like cats and dogs (pun intended), the scheming aranea, the Creole/Aboriginal lizardkin, the manscorpions that disintegrate in the sun, and the orcs that fight for a red dragon they think is a god... there's a lot of gold in the AD&D version that was only touched on in the OD&D version. ASIDE: There was a meta-plot reason for the transition from OD&D mechanics to AD&D mechanics for the Red Curse.  The aranea, a constant thorn in the side of the dragon-kin that once dominated the region (before even the Oltecs arrived), kept the Red Curse in line with powerful arcane wards, wards that collapsed during the Week Without Magic (at the end of the Great War).  When magic returned, the wards did not, expanding the area and strength of the Curse from the Barionies to much of the southern Savage Coast.  The aranea have been too busy fighting prejudice (and xenophobic fear that people will learn their secret) to raise the wards once more.</blockquote>

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