One thing that weighs favourably towards TSR D&D rulesets for me is the different experience of character levels. Character levels in TSR D&D just strike me as having far more heft  to them, than levels in 3e onwards.  I remember being much more proud of my AD&D fighter reaching 5th level than I ever was of reaching much higher levels in 3e or 5e. And it's not just due to nostalgia. The achievement felt more significant, as if 5th level in AD&D meant more than 9th level does in 5e. Not only in terms of my investment as a player, but also in terms of what that meant for the character in the world. A 7th lvl fighter in B/X or AD&D setting is a big deal to my mind. A force in the world. A 7th lvl fighter in 5e strikes me as a somewhat more run-of-the-mill character. The AD&D 7th lvl fighter seems somehow further removed from 1st lvl than the equivalent 3e/5e character, It's a nebulous impression that is hard to explain or justify. And I am partly writing t...

 I've blogged about Dragonlance and the 5th Age before. The post-War of the Lance world was meant to be an open-ended one, but struggled to escape the confines of what was once Dragonlance's biggest asset: The saga of the Heroes on the Lance, which by then had become its most confining burden.  It seemed impossible to tell new stories of new heroes in a meaningful way - Even the fastforward of 25 years didn't really do much and left the world sort of aimless and floundering in what it wanted to be.  Dragons of Summer Flame changed all that. It definitively closed the book on the Heroes of the Lance and left a new world, upheavaled by change - Dark knights, a world scarred by warfare and chaos, and of course the departure of the gods heralding the last, longest and eventually brightest age of the world: The long foretold Age of Mortals. This I felt was actually the kind of open-ended world Dragonlance deserved to be. I thought the introduction of Mysticism was an eminent...

 Every so often, I get questions about the status of Book 6, the companion volume for Into the Unknown. I've mostly said "still in the works", sometimes with quarterly estimates that haven't held up. Thank god I never kickstarted this So, what has been the hold up? I feel like at this stage, I might as well give a proper explanation. Basically, for the past 3 years, I've been sick from a tick bite that the doctors weren't able to diagnose. Antibiotics didn't work. For a few months, I could barely walk more than 50m without a break. Getting up the stairs to the 1st floor of my apartment was a struggle. Couldn't even watch a movie or read a book as my mind was so foggy, I couldn't follow the plot.  Things got a bit better after about 3 months, once I started herbal treatment. I was able to push Into the Unknown out the door because I had the vast majority of the work already done and I was lying home sick every day anyway, so even though I was very r...

I've reviewed the Forgotten Realms as a setting before.  To sum up the issues with the setting: In its present incarnation it's an unmanageable mess, plain simple. The tabletop equivalent of the Marvel universe - Overburdened with an absolute immensity of 'canon' , loads of 'story line' developments that have no relation to gamers, universe-wide 'crossover events', desperate retcons and a handful of mary sue novel characters blazing a trail of shit through the setting that no one cares about.  WotC have done what they can to salvage the wreckage in 5e. An ill defined event to normalize the wreck that was 4e, move the timeline forward to let the passage of time erase as much of the canon baggage as possible, be intentionally vague about what has actually changed and otherwise just leave the setting the fuck alone, so gamers can walk around without tripping over 'setting lore' at every step. It's ok I guess, as a cardboard background f...

NB. If you're only here for the cool new map, it's at the bottom of the post. Primeval Thule is a "sword and sorcery" pastiche setting that takes its primary inspiration from Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and H.P. Lovecraft - For D&D. It has books for 5e, 4e, pathfinder, 13th Age and Savage Worlds. Here I will be reviewing the book for 5e. Despite the strong influence these authors have had on the D&D genre, D&D settings who take these as a primary and overriding influence are rare, so a setting adopting a more purist interpretation of these is a welcome addition. The concept art for the setting certainly makes an evocative intro: What other settings might compare to such an effort? Setting to one side pastiche OSR efforts (such as Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea), then Wilderlands of High Fantasy has a lot of S&S, but its (delightful) kitchen sink approach means it can not be considered a...

First, a little sidenote further on the nature of gods from Appendix A in  Temple of Elemental Evil.  Here we get a full list of deities and they are classified in three: "Greater", of which there are roughly a dozen, "lesser", of which there are many, and "demigods", of which there's a handful.  Looking at the number and nature of the greater gods, it tallies well with my assumption that lesser gods are the kind of embodied, fallible deities who busy themselves with human affairs I discussed in my previous article , whilst greater gods are genuinely transcendent; pantheon fountainheads. more akin to sentient cosmic principle than to the kind of "divinely endowed people" the lesser gods are. With that out of the way, on to Iuz... Representing Iuz the Old as something more out of a slavic mythic north, a la  Koschei the Deathless The description of Iuz in the Folio as "Old Iuz of fear-babe talk", who has ruled the lan...

I already wrote about the deities and pantheons of Mythic Greyhawk before , but after reading Dragon Magazine #67's article The Deities & Demigods of the World of Greyhawk  I'm inspired to doodle a bit more about this, taking the implications of that article as a springboard. The first thing that jumps at me from that article is the initial coverage of the nature of gods. We are told what kind of spell-like abilities gods of various statures have. Each of the four deities (Heironeous, Hextor, Iuz & St. Cuthbert) are statted out as conventional (albeit powerful) critters who, apart from being deities of certain things, can be encountered and killed like any other. We learn this from the note stating how Iuz has a soul object  secreted away in the abyss that leaves him free to roam outside his domain with no fear of permanent harm. No mention of 'avatars', or other divine trappings of later editions. From left to right: Heironeous; Hextor; Iuz & St. C...