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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="Gloombunny" data-source="post: 3800728" data-attributes="member: 54916">I know you didn't ask me, but here's my opinion anyway!In Dying Earth magic, even a very experienced wizard can only memorize a handful of spells at a time, but spells tend to be exceedingly powerful at doing the one thing they do.  For instance, "The Excellent Prismatic Spray" is a popular spell that causes beams of searing light to spring from every direction, piercing the victim's body in a thousand places and instantly killing them.  There's nothing like a saving throw; only rare and powerful defensive magic can save the victim once the spell is cast.  In D&D, a wizard gets many more spells memorized at a time, but spells can be resisted without magic, and are much more "balanced" with non-magical competencies.  (That D&D magic is more balanced with fighting skill than DE magic is saying a lot, of course.)  Also, D&D wizards can memorize the same spell multiple times.In the Dying Earth, spells are only a small portion of a wizard's power.  Most of a wizard's time is spent collecting and crafting magical items, or doing other magical lab-work that doesn't easily fit into D&D, like Turjan's attempts to create intelligent life out of a vat.  The most powerful of wizards simply bind the incredibly powerful "sandestins" into service and rely on them for nearly all their magical needs.  Also, many wizards, especially the ones who do anything like adventuring, are physically fit, skilled in swordplay and athletics.  In D&D, spells are the beginning and the end of wizardry, and even item crafting is based on imbuing an object with power from the spells you know.  D&D wizards are generally frail nerds who barely know which end is up on a sword, even though they go on adventures and get in fights all the time.Finally, in the DE setting the only spells available are the ones preserved in ancient texts.  Most of the ancient magical knowledge has been lost, and the ability to create new spells is a thing of the distant past.  When it comes to spells, wizards don't really know what they're doing; they've just learned by rote formulae laid out thousands of years earlier.  In D&D, wizards thoroughly understand their magic, can research their own spells, and can modify the effects of a spell with metamagic or use their knowledge of it to build items of similar power.</blockquote>

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