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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="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9825036" data-attributes="member: 18">Thank you.I'm not trying to point this out to be mean or w/e, but I think it's pretty important to separate out what the actual D&D team members might want and what their skills might be from what WotC and Hasbro want and require from them. Especially as most of those designers will likely eventually move on from WotC.In TTRPGs, there's essentially only one "corporate" RPG company, and that's WotC. A couple of others might heading that way, but they're still a fundamentally different kind of company, and not owned by a larger company whose sole and entire concern is short-term shareholder profits (a narrow concern that has lead Hasbro to screw itself - and sometimes WotC - over, quite a number of times).So with a different, non-corporate company, it might be much fairer to blame "the writers" or the lead designer of a product. Here though we must look at the corporate goals and leadership.I do think that whatever the cause, WotC have had a bit of a curve on the quality of the setting-type products, it started with a lot of fairly decent or at least moderate quality settings (including most of the MtG settings), but reached its nadir with Spelljammer, which experienced the incredible triple-threat of putting gimmicky format ahead of function (three identical-page-count slim hardbacks in a slipcase is... not a good format for a D&D setting book, sorry - almost anything not that would be better - like not making them identical page count even!), of experiencing some deeply and frankly easily avoidable idiocy with the monkey-people, and also a clear late-in-design change of direction which lead to faux-Athas being destroyed where they'd clearly originally intended it to be just straight-up Athas, right down to specific monsters. Every setting book before that was at least somewhat better (even if the general direction was decline), and every setting book after that has been better (that I'm aware of, anyway).(Re: Spelljammer, I daresay the bizarre format choice was 100% on WotC leadership and 0% on the D&D team or what they wanted. The monkey business was clearly on the D&D team though, and the Athas thing... I have no idea. Did corporate at that time want to bury Athas, and the D&D team convinced them otherwise but too late to redesign? Or the exact opposite? Or something even more odd?)Hopefully that up-curve continues and the inevitable Dark Sun book is good. I am skeptical, but I do hope. There are ways it could be done even within the strictures of WotC's goals, and still be good, but are they going to let people find those ways, or just enblandify it? We shall see.I did until you asked me! Then I immediately forgot! THANKS!!! Classic ADHD brain-fail I admit.So I had to look it up, and I was like "Oh yeah I knew that at some point!".But as you say, I did have to look it up, you have me there! Raedra Obarskyr for the record. And to be fair, she sounds absolutely as insufferably flawless, smug, smarmy and eye-roll-inducing as every other bloody ruler of Cormyr, so Cormyr-fans, who clearly love insufferable twerps*, should embrace her!* = (because what else is Cormyr about if not being insufferable in virtually every possible regard? Every awful trope of ultra-romanticised faux-medieval Britain and equally romanticised rural Midwestern America somehow rolled into one place)</blockquote>

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