Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9519003" data-attributes="member: 18">Pretty easy one for me - my <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_of_the_Dragon#" target="_blank">Time of the Dragon</a> boxed set. No other D&D product has been remotely as influential on me, and I still have the books around, where most of my older RPG stuff is in storage. The two books are pretty battered now because I still look at them sometimes.The Taladas setting it created was unlike anything else at the time, and still I don't think there's really much comparable, because it had unusual influences - being basically influenced by the Dark Ages and South and Central Europe (including equivalents of the WRE/Late Rome and ERE/Byzantium) and Eurasia (particularly the steppes), and parts of Oceania, as well as some more pure fantasy stuff, like a crumbling apartheid society (just begging for renewal as a unified one), a little democracy full of the outcasts of other nations, jungle elves constantly hunted by degenerate mind flayers, and so on. It also, and note this was the very first setting book for 2nd Edition (!!!), had playable Goblins, Ogres, Lizardmen, Minotaurs and others. The cultures it described were rich in detail and atypical for fantasy, and often did stuff that was pretty daring/progressive for 1989 (like one of the steppe tribes only let women be wizards, but people born male could choose to identify and live in all ways as women in that culture, including becoming wizards - there was no judgement, homophobia/transphobia or titillation about this either, it was just treated as any other cultural factor). The most dangerous steppe tribes were elves and half-elves, which was a real swerve for how elves were typically written in that era or even decades later. The goblins and ogres were misunderstood rather than evil, but not in a lame/twee/preachy way, they were just bordered by aggressive human or elf cultures and didn't have the cultural and technological tools to assert themselves. Further, the book had an incredible chart showing how the languages of the continent related to each other (or didn't!) in a way that felt so infinitely more real than "I guess everyone speaks common".I've probably got other stuff worth a lot more, and likely in a lot better condition, but it's the one I prize most by far.</blockquote>

Verification