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Notahippie posted:The sheer size of it also meant that a lot of them got loving weird, which was great. Spelljammer and Dark Sun were really left-field settings. To me in the grand scheme of things they look like they made more sense than having 5 different fantasy worlds. D&D in post-apocalypse! D&D IN SPAAAACE. Rather than D&D in one guys home brewed world (Greyhawk), D&D in another guys home brewed world (Forgotten Realms), D&D in another homebrew (Blackmoor), D&D in a well thought out fantasy world that no one in management cared about but started as disjointed series of adventures (Mystera), D&D in fantasy world that's a long term TV series that's ahead of its time but you will be on rails (Dragonlance). D&D in FantasyCity (Lakahmer). I never understood at the time that D&D Lost Worlds was actually Hollow World. I can understand trying to do D&D Horror (Ravenloft). Was there a D&D Edgy 90's world to compete with White Wolf? Or was that Ravenloft. But I do think they were reaching when they made the Complete book of Thri-Kreen(?).
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May 2, 2020 02:36
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e: nm
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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May 2, 2020 02:51
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Comstar posted:To me in the grand scheme of things they look like they made more sense than having 5 different fantasy worlds. D&D in post-apocalypse! D&D IN SPAAAACE. Wasn't that kinda-sorta Planescape?
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May 2, 2020 02:53
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Absurd Alhazred posted:How dare you forget Darksun?! They didn't. Comstar posted:To me in the grand scheme of things they look like they made more sense than having 5 different fantasy worlds. D&D in post-apocalypse! D&D IN SPAAAACE.
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May 2, 2020 02:54
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e: nm
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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May 2, 2020 02:55
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Mike Danger posted:Wasn't that kinda-sorta Planescape? Planescape was laid out like a White Wolf book, with Factions and politicking and secrets. It wasn't edgy per se, but it borrowed a lot of the style.
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May 2, 2020 02:55
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e: nm
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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May 2, 2020 02:58
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I really dug Sig and Ptolus is cool for what it is, but man, I could really go for more pan-dimensional fantasy. The Soft Horizon came close, but I wish pan-dimensional fantasy was a bigger genre.
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May 2, 2020 02:59
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Anyway, I personally like a varied set of worlds. The varied set of worlds was great, but the way they splintered the base wasn't so great. Like, Eberron has the whole "everything from D&D belongs here!" thing going, which is a Big Deal. It means you aren't discouraged from engaging with the source material that isn't specifically siloed for your setting. The 2E settings, uh, did not universally do that well. Spelljammer and Planescape did it reasonably well, but Ravenloft and Dark Sun less so. And all of them were uneven about really pointing out all the ways you could use the core stuff or other expansion stuff. It definitely didn't feel like there was anyone thinking about that at all, and a lot of the settings made specific points of "some of the core stuff doesn't work here" which is the opposite of what you want.
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May 2, 2020 03:33
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Comstar posted:I can understand trying to do D&D Horror (Ravenloft). Was there a D&D Edgy 90's world to compete with White Wolf? Or was that Ravenloft. You forgot Birthright, which was a kingdom management system attached to a w/e setting. Notahippie posted:The sheer size of it also meant that a lot of them got loving weird, which was great. Spelljammer and Dark Sun were really left-field settings.
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May 2, 2020 03:51
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My first introduction to RPG's was thanks to 2nd edition's massive amount of books - a family member bought me the 4 "Encyclopedia Magica" books as a birthday gift when I was like 11 - I had never played a pen and paper RPG before, and didn't own anything else. And wouldn't for years, but I loved going through them and imagining what all those items looked like and did
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May 2, 2020 03:51
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BaronVanAwesome posted:My first introduction to RPG's was thanks to 2nd edition's massive amount of books - a family member bought me the 4 "Encyclopedia Magica" books as a birthday gift when I was like 11 - I had never played a pen and paper RPG before, and didn't own anything else. This is super cute. 
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May 2, 2020 04:20
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 I don't know how comprehensive Wikipedia is on this. I appreciate that Warcraft is considered an official campaign setting.
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May 2, 2020 05:28
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As someone who has been a fan of Matt Mercer when he was only known as a good voice actor, it really makes me happy to see Exandria up there. When I hear stories of people that would send in stuff for magazines and eventually become designers in the actual TSR/WotC company I can't help but imagine he felt the same happiness they did since he's been playing since he was a kid and his own mom used to play too.
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May 2, 2020 05:43
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Kwyndig posted:Planescape was laid out like a White Wolf book, with Factions and politicking and secrets. It wasn't edgy per se, but it borrowed a lot of the style. Dammit, you're right. It was too edgy for me so I never bought any of the books for it, though I did go 1/3 of the way through Torment. Also I think I was annoyed they sorta/did(?) replace SpellJammer with Planescape to tie all the different worlds together. I'm catching up on a lot of the stuff TSR made in the 90's I never had the money to buy, and I really do miss it all. I'm never going to have the chance to play all the Dragonlance modules in order or jump between crystal spheres, but I do now have a chance to read them as PDF. It must have been something to try and keep up every month with TSR's production, before it all came crashing down.
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May 2, 2020 06:18
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Comstar posted:I'm catching up on a lot of the stuff TSR made in the 90's I never had the money to buy, and I really do miss it all. I'm never going to have the chance to play all the Dragonlance modules in order or jump between crystal spheres, but I do now have a chance to read them as PDF. It must have been something to try and keep up every month with TSR's production, before it all came crashing down.
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May 2, 2020 06:28
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Admiral Joeslop posted:
How is Warcraft here but not Diablo when there were official Diablo products for 2E and 3E?
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May 2, 2020 06:37
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Admiral Joeslop posted:
Fairly comprehensive, but not entirely. It is missing, for example, the D&D campaign world that brought me to this forum in the first place. No, seriously. For one project I've been working on (and will probably be perpetually working on and never finish, because I have a tendency to bite off way more than I can chew), I wanted to draw in elements from every D&D world ever published by TSR or Wizards of the Coast. All of them. Some of them were harder to find information about than others, but there was one in particular that I could find almost no information about. It only appeared as the setting of two adventures, written and published by a separate company licensed to do so (but the adventures' copyright still resided with TSR, so they met my criteria), and, perhaps most notably, they were only published in Hebrew. I'd been scouring the web for more information on this gameworld—I mean, it didn't actually seem like a very interesting world, frankly, but I really did want to try to draw in elements from every "officially" published world—but with little success—it was easy to find the names of the adventures, and I did manage to find a bit of info on two (extremely stupid) new monsters that appeared in them, but nothing beyond that. Heck, I would even have been willing to pay a reasonable amount (or even an only moderately unreasonable amount) to get my hands on the actual adventures, but I couldn't find them for sale anywhere. Then one day my search led me to some posts in the Fatal & Friends forum by By popular demand that gave more details about the modules in question than I'd ever been able to find anywhere else. Obviously, I'm not saying the reason I joined the forum or am still posting here is in the hopes of finding out more about the modules, but that seriously is how I ran across the forum in the first place. (I'm pretty sure, though, that the Wikipedia list does cover all the actual major settings, in the sense that they had sourcebooks devoted to them; there were other worlds that were mentioned in various works but never really fleshed out, so it's understandable that they're not included. Although Mahasarpa is kind of an odd one out in that list in that it wasn't a major setting; as far as I know it only appeared in a single web supplement.) E: Actually, BattleMaster's right; Diablo should be there too. I didn't think of it because it doesn't meet the criteria of my personal project—I said above that I was trying to pull from all the worlds ever published by TSR/Wizards of the Coast, but that's not really accurate; I should have said all the worlds published by TSR/Wizards of the Coast and that Wizards of the Coast still held copyright to, which of course isn't true of the world of Diablo. But yeah, there were sourcebooks devoted to it (heck, I have those sourcebooks for some reason, even though I never used them and never even played any of the computer games—I've really been far more of a collector than I should have), so yeah, like BattleMaster said, if Warcraft is there Diablo should be included as well. Jerik fucked around with this message at 06:44 on May 2, 2020 |
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May 2, 2020 06:41
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Comstar posted:Dammit, you're right. It was too edgy for me so I never bought any of the books for it, though I did go 1/3 of the way through Torment. Also I think I was annoyed they sorta/did(?) replace SpellJammer with Planescape to tie all the different worlds together.
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May 2, 2020 06:41
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Nessus posted:Did Planescape or Changeling the Dreaming come first? Because I know that one artist was really foundational to both styles. Planescape was first, but the artist had done some D&D work even before that.
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May 2, 2020 06:49
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Jerik posted:Then one day my search led me to some posts in the Fatal & Friends forum by By popular demand that gave more details about the modules in question than I'd ever been able to find anywhere else. I remember reading that! I love the poo poo out of that kind of archaeology.
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May 2, 2020 06:49
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Desiden posted:Could someone else match Paizo today? Let's look at Mongoose Traveller, 2e ! The core book for the new edition was published in 2016. Also in 2016 we have the big spaceship book, High Guard; and the Central Supply Catalogue. There were also 4 mini-supplements, 17-18 page guides published as ebooks; 2 books detailing one or more ships, and 4 adventures in the 32-48 page range. So in the launch year they put out two more core books, 6 small supplements, and 4 adventures which also serve to explore the setting in detail. Since then they have published a major setting book, a campaign weighing in at 105 pages, a rules companion sort of thing, two more mini-supplements and 13 more adventures in the same range. That's 16 more books from 32 to 287 pages, and 2 smaller. On top of that, the Pirates of Drinax campaign, originally published as free material has been revamped, re-edited, and is now a 596 page core book and 11 small ebook supplements running a total of almost 800 pages. They have also published two boxed sets; one adventure-oriented set covering the 4 sectors of the Great Rift, and another providing deck plans for a large Imperial warship and rules for running a naval campaign. A third boxed set, an epic voyage spanning 20 years of in-game time, has been Kickstarted but not yet fully released. As a cherry on top, they also took the original Journal of the Traveller's Aid Society magazine, re-edited, did new maps and other graphics, and published them as a six-volume slipcover edition to add 6 more 128 page volumes to the tally. In four years that's the core book, 10 100+ page books, 2 boxed sets, a campaign, a huge campaign, and 2 boxed sets with a third forthcoming, plus 19 small ebook supplements and adventures. That's just the 2e Traveller books, I hesitate to count how much they did for 1e, but there were 6 128 page books on alien races just to start with for 1e's 8 year history. Based on how eager people have been to throw fat stacks of cash at their Kickstarters, they just might be able to pull off a subscription model. Their main problem with doing that is that the playable areas of the setting are both spread out and numerous, so making sure everyone got their money's worth would be a stretch. mllaneza fucked around with this message at 07:33 on May 2, 2020 |
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May 2, 2020 07:20
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Admiral Joeslop posted:
The warcraft settings aren't "official" to D&D, they were written by Swords and Sorcery (Which was White Wolf's D20 publishing arm) under the d20 License. They were actually really loving good lore bibles for the setting before they retconned literally everything a few years ago. BattleMaster posted:How is Warcraft here but not Diablo when there were official Diablo products for 2E and 3E? Maybe because the Warcraft books were d20 licensed? 
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May 2, 2020 16:26
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Kurieg posted:The warcraft settings aren't "official" to D&D, they were written by Swords and Sorcery (Which was White Wolf's D20 publishing arm) under the d20 License. They were actually really loving good lore bibles for the setting before they retconned literally everything a few years ago. Weren't they more Warcraft 3-based instead of WoW?
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May 2, 2020 16:28
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Dawgstar posted:Weren't they more Warcraft 3-based instead of WoW? They were originally Warcraft 3, and then were revised for WoW and 3.5.
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May 2, 2020 16:33
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Dawgstar posted:Weren't they more Warcraft 3-based instead of WoW? It was both. There were d20-licensed Warcraft books based on the lore as established by WC3, and then a later set of books based on what was established by WoW. Diablo had a similar thing where there were some books that were compatible with AD&D 2e, and then a later set that was for D&D 3e.
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May 2, 2020 16:33
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Dawgstar posted:Weren't they more Warcraft 3-based instead of WoW? They did some WC3 books (that honestly weren't very good) but eventually rebooted the line as the World of Warcraft roleplaying game that, amongst other things, could be played independantly of the 3.0 PHB since it had the full ruleset, but also it's own classes. It also had class archetypes and stuff. It's a relatively good d20 product as far as those things are concerned.
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May 2, 2020 16:38
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 The World of Warcraft books were pretty good for lore. I was heavily into WoW at the time and they used an in game archeology character as the narrator. I think they worked pretty heavily with Blizzard to get the details right, as the only things generally wrong between the books and game were changed late in the game or retconned later.
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May 2, 2020 16:59
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At the end of a 3e campaign I ran I was just throwing the statted-up raid bosses from the WoW books at the players, just reskinned.
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May 2, 2020 17:05
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Gobbeldygook posted:Dark Sun is an answer to "why don't wizards just run everything?". In Dark Sun's case the answer is that yes a dozen wizard god-kings committed genocide against all of the stock fantasy races the authors didn't like, destroyed most of the world, and now live cloistered in city-states while any other wizards are prone to being murdered by mobs of pitchfork-wielding angry peasants. Dark Sun also tackles the question of "Why don't clerics heal all injuries, cure all illnesses, and perpetually summon food and water for the poor?" Tackles it off a cliff, that is, by killing all the gods so the only form of divine magic that sorta works is for druids.
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May 2, 2020 17:11
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Admiral Joeslop posted:
He basically had direct access to the WoW lore bible and the Warcraft people had a lot of input on what went into the book, so it was pretty much game accurate lore until they started Retconning stuff in the chronicles book to be more pulpy(Fine I guess?) and so that their Waifu could be even more badass(No)
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May 2, 2020 17:41
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Isn't WoW lore a gigantic loving clusterfuck at the moment?
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May 2, 2020 17:50
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Why yes, yes it is. It started off with time travel, then moved on to alternate universes, then telling the player that things they had previously known to be true were actually false, then actually just straight up lying to the playerbase so that their pet character can look like a puppetmaster.
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May 2, 2020 17:54
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Josef bugman posted:Isn't WoW lore a gigantic loving clusterfuck at the moment? It's always been a mess of changes and retcons. That's a problem you run into with a 16 year old MMO, all the stuff from previous games is now dead or already been run through.
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May 2, 2020 17:54
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Kurieg posted:Why yes, yes it is. It started off with time travel, then moved on to alternate universes, then telling the player that things they had previously known to be true were actually false, then actually just straight up lying to the playerbase so that their pet character can look like a puppetmaster. Admiral Joeslop posted:It's always been a mess of changes and retcons. That's a problem you run into with a 16 year old MMO, all the stuff from previous games is now dead or already been run through. Oh dear. I am glad I got out way back when Wrath of the Lich King came out. Is it just me or does blizzard really seem to be just "coasting" at the moment?
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May 2, 2020 17:56
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Josef bugman posted:Oh dear. I am glad I got out way back when Wrath of the Lich King came out. It's not as bad as a lot of people will (very loudly) tell you, IMO. If you've never played the game before, the story will probably confuse you immensely since you'll technically be jumping back and forth in the timeline as you progress through the expansions, but apparently this is being addressed in the upcoming expansion.
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May 2, 2020 18:07
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Josef bugman posted:Oh dear. I am glad I got out way back when Wrath of the Lich King came out. Legion was actually a really good expansion, probably the best since Wrath. Battle For Azeroth has poo poo the bed and is probably the worst expansion? Cataclysm at least revamped the old world even if it didn't bring anything else. I'm still pretty annoyed at their response to the China protests last year, when they fired an esports dude for publicly endorsing the protesters during a live interview. They also then fired the two Chinese interviewers who had immediately hid their faces and refused to interact with the person at all, because the Chinese government told Blizzard to.
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May 2, 2020 18:08
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Is there a good guide/article/screed on how WoW lore is screwed up, for me to laugh and learn with?
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May 2, 2020 18:13
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Comrade Koba posted:It's not as bad as a lot of people will (very loudly) tell you, IMO. If you've never played the game before, the story will probably confuse you immensely since you'll technically be jumping back and forth in the timeline as you progress through the expansions, but apparently this is being addressed in the upcoming expansion. I mean, it's being addressed in a hilariously videogamey way with yet more time travel, so "yes". And no, it is bad, because they portray the same events differently to both factions to that they can both feel like they're the heroes despite the fact that one faction is led by a leader hellbent on omnicide and the other faction is forced to hold the idiot ball from time to time so that said omnicidal dictator gets to be cool.
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May 2, 2020 18:30
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Kurieg posted:And no, it is bad, because they portray the same events differently to both factions to that they can both feel like they're the heroes despite the fact that one faction is led by a leader hellbent on omnicide and the other faction is forced to hold the idiot ball from time to time so that said omnicidal dictator gets to be cool. Oh, right, you're the guy who thought players who made storyline choices you didn't like in an MMO should have their characters deleted from the game.. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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May 2, 2020 19:26
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