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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yora" data-source="post: 8333664" data-attributes="member: 6670763">I only got into D&D in 2000, only weeks before the release of 3rd edition, and the vast amount of D&D material in my early days was 2nd edition stuff. I really only got an actual glimps into earlier D&D six years or so ago.And looking at the full corpus of D&D material in hindsight, I think the biggest shift D&D ever did in tone and style was during the late 80s with the development of AD&D 2nd edition. It's a time where most of the original people had left the company and you got a new leadership with very different visions for the future.And one man in particular really stands out to me in the credits of a number of 1st edition and BECMI adventures that clearly show the start of a new trend. Tracy Hickmann.Pharaoh in 1982, Ravenloft and Rahasia in 1983, and of course Dragonlance in 1984.Arneson came up with the idea for dungeon crawling heroes and Gygax developed it into a commercial product. But it seems to me that Hickmann might actually have singlehandedly introduced and codified the idea of adventures as stories that the PCs participate in, rather as dungeons to be cleared that have some background story attached to them, which the players might discover pieces off if they look for it carefully.If that is a good thing or not is an entirely different discussion. But I feel that Hickmann's contribution to D&D was as transformative as Arneson's idea to turn the Chainmail wargame into a dungeon crawler.</blockquote>

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