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KingKalamari posted:The only thing I can think of for Dark Sun is that slavery exists as an institution in it and that might not be a look WotC wants from one of their campaign settings? Other than that I'm honestly coming up blank. There's also a boatload of genocide in the backstory. I don't have a problem with WOTC saying "we aren't up to this" given how they've botched a lot lately.
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Mar 14, 2023 22:48
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Whirling posted:I think the last few things I recall about 5e discourse was that people got into the idea of wheelchairs being important to have in these fantasy settings where you can get summoned skeletons to lift you on a palanquin, or magic carpets to zoom around on, or literally anything else that can go down stairs (a common feature of many a dungeon) without much trouble, Sounds like you may have seen these awful bits of discourse primarily as a story told by one side after it died down. No one was trying to force wheelchairs into 5e's next manual or anything. Someone published a ruleset for a combat wheelchair and then predictable chuds vs. nonchuds arguments started happening. And while yes, there are a variety of ways that magic can move people about, the wheelchair was meant to provide another way for people to do that, one that would let some historically underserved folks see themselves in the game. They weren't trying to replace magical exoskeletons or Tenser's Floating Back Brace or whatever, just provide a new option that a lot of people genuinely want. Ask yourself if you give a poo poo when viewed through that lens, and then spend a second imagining the sort of person that would. Oh, and unrelated, Dark Sun isn't that far in the past, it got two books during 4e. They kept in the slavery but were pretty straightforward about it, and I do not recall there being a huge fight about it in 2010 when that happened. theironjef fucked around with this message at 23:03 on Mar 14, 2023 |
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Mar 14, 2023 22:57
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theironjef posted:Sounds like you may have seen these awful bits of discourse primarily as a story told by one side after it died down. No one was trying to force wheelchairs into 5e's next manual or anything. Someone published a ruleset for a combat wheelchair and then predictable chuds vs. nonchuds arguments started happening. And while yes, there are a variety of ways that magic can move people about, the wheelchair was meant to provide another way for people to do that, one that would let some historically underserved folks see themselves in the game. They weren't trying to replace magical exoskeletons or Tenser's Floating Back Brace or whatever, just provide a new option that a lot of people genuinely want. Ask yourself if you give a poo poo when viewed through that lens, and then spend a second imagining the sort of person that would. Oh, I didn't know it was a third party thing. I don't play D&D, just hear about it second-hand.
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Mar 14, 2023 23:34
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PurpleXVI posted:I'm trying to think back and I can't even really think of anything about Dark Sun that could be perceived as offensive these days. Dark Sun does have the race of sterile half-breed laborers called "muls," which is a name that was hopefully meant to evoke "mule" and not "mulatto." Given that Dark Sun is basically a mash-up of Dune and Tekumel as filtered through the trappings of D&D, it's almost a wonder it didn't inherit more problematic elements from its inspirations.
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Mar 15, 2023 00:01
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gtrmp posted:Dark Sun does have the race of sterile half-breed laborers called "muls," which is a name that was hopefully meant to evoke "mule" and not "mulatto." Etymologically, Mulatto comes from Mule...
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Mar 15, 2023 00:11
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I got too much of a negative mindset, I guess, so I guess I'll say that I'm happy I get to finally play in a game after a year or so of nothing but GMing.
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Mar 15, 2023 00:18
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Whirling posted:I got too much of a negative mindset, I guess, so I guess I'll say that I'm happy I get to finally play in a game after a year or so of nothing but GMing.
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Mar 15, 2023 00:19
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Whirling posted:I got too much of a negative mindset, I guess, so I guess I'll say that I'm happy I get to finally play in a game after a year or so of nothing but GMing.
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Mar 15, 2023 00:36
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dwarf74 posted:Picking "people who want fantasy wheelchairs" as what's wrong with D&D these days is a real weird take, so maybe ease up a bit before picking chuds' favorite windmills to tilt at. Ok, but can this be dropped if I say I'm sorry, because I'm sorry. I got mad at the other guy calling me a dude and wanted to pick a fight, it was stupid, shouldn't have said that poo poo, so can I please talk about literally anything else
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Mar 15, 2023 00:44
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Yeah go ahead, just do it.
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Mar 15, 2023 01:08
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My books are out in the garage but I'm fairly certain when 4e did Mul they just dropped the whole sterility thing. It didn't accomplish much besides check a box for weird biotruthers anyway. Same sort of folks that need to get real specific about why there's half-orcs for some reason. You know, assholes.
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Mar 15, 2023 01:25
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I just picked up the Al Qadim 5e book (I'm planning on running a campaign based on P. Djeli Clark's Master of Djinn, so I wanted some 5e Djinn stats as a guide) and the reviews on DMG were interesting...Some Guy on OneBookShelf posted:Some people appreciate having fantasy that is tailored to their political ideas. As the discussions in this theread show, there are others who appreciate not having their fantasy worlds influenced by daily politics. and Some Other Guy on OneBookShelf posted:I must admit, this book had a lot of work into it. But I feel your attempts to "sanitise" the setting made it feel a lot more bland. Downplaying the "controversial" elements strips the world of a lot, in the opinion of myself and my players. What was removed? The original setting materials included detailed instructions on how humans could purchase and own other humans. The original setting materials also included stuff like an NPC who was specifically described as being 16 years old when she married a 40-odd-year-old man and began having children with him. So these got removed and people are bitching. Yeah.
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Mar 15, 2023 01:34
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:So these got removed and people are bitching. Yeah. I want to think that some of them are just bitching because anything changed. But I can't bring myself to.
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Mar 15, 2023 02:11
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Nigmaetcetera posted:Has anybody made an RPG setting based specifically on The Shaver Mysteries? No Cthulhu or Agartha stuff mixed in, just an RPG sourcebook based on one man’s delusions? I could get into that.  sadomasochism going on. It's not Gor, but it ain't great.The most thorough treatment of the Dero I've seen is in Veins of the Earth, where the subtext is the text: they're a sort of memetic virus that causes paranoia, conspiracism, and delusions about mysterious magical machines. KingKalamari posted:Mystara is a really interesting setting to look into from a historical perspective because it's both one of the oldest, but it didn't end up having the same impact on D&D's identity that campaign settings like Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms did. It's sort of like the Burgess Shale of campaign settings, in that it contains a lot of worldbuilding elements that feel like evolutionary offshoots of old D&D that went extinct. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 02:53 on Mar 15, 2023 |
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Mar 15, 2023 02:38
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Nigmaetcetera posted:Has anybody made an RPG setting based specifically on The Shaver Mysteries? No Cthulhu or Agartha stuff mixed in, just an RPG sourcebook based on one man’s delusions? I could get into that. Having read I Remember Lemuria, not sure how much I wanna roleplay about how uncontrollably attractive 80-foot-tall Aryan Snake Women are
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Mar 15, 2023 02:48
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hosed up that its snake women and not lemur women that are coming from Lemuria. I mean, come on, its in the name
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Mar 15, 2023 02:50
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Whirling posted:hosed up that its snake women and not lemur women that are coming from Lemuria. I mean, come on, its in the name I'm pretty sure there's some of those in there too, the Hollow Earth is a menagerie of fetishes. The main love interest in the story has lavender skin, goat legs and a "flirtatious" tail, it's deviantArt before deviantArt. Lotta psychic sex in bacta tanks and wars against the degenerate subhumans who kidnap people and bring them to their underground labyrinth to torture for fun like some QAnon Pizzagate poo poo.
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Mar 15, 2023 03:34
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Ominous Jazz posted:Does 5e even have psionics or what? Yes - although psionic lovers really don't like that they are mixed up with the Far Realm. There's a feat for telepaths and one for telekinetics that can come from any class. The Psion class is now the Aberrant Mind subclass of Sorcerer with their metamagic points working as power points and some people hate that at level 14 you get some tentacly transformation (but there's no need for anything else that's not pure "classic" psion). The Soul Knife rogue subclass is basically 90s era Psylocke. The Psi Warrior subclass is a telekinetic fighter who can do things like telekinetic leaps and block attacks. The Astral Self Monk punches people with the power of their mind and is basically an unarmed telekinetic brawler. And the Great Old One Warlock and one or two of the bard subclasses are borderline psychics if you build them that way. They are there if you want to play them but they aren't a big focus.
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Mar 15, 2023 04:37
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:I just picked up the Al Qadim 5e book (I'm planning on running a campaign based on P. Djeli Clark's Master of Djinn, so I wanted some 5e Djinn stats as a guide) and the reviews on DMG were interesting... There's a 5E Al-Qadim book!? neonchameleon posted:Yes - although psionic lovers really don't like that they are mixed up with the Far Realm. I just think they're not good enoguh at emulating the 70s psychic powers that inspired the original D&D psionics.
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Mar 15, 2023 05:36
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MonsieurChoc posted:I just think they're not good enoguh at emulating the 70s psychic powers that inspired the original D&D psionics. Yeah, definitely not, though that's probably because they didn't try as hard to integrate them into their base story as a lot of the other stuff. Monk at least will always have the easy fallback of "Martial Arts/unarmed" class, but stuff like Psionics was always pushed off to followup books, so it never gelled. At this point they have a solid idea of what D&D psionics are (we're on what, the third iteration of the Soul Knife?) but no one gives a poo poo about it because they remember the OP brown splatbook from 2e and so on. I know I do. That said, I don't miss a lot of it from back then. The overcomplicated rock paper scissors grid of attacks and defenses, etc., boo to that stuff.
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Mar 15, 2023 06:34
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I miss the Expanded Psionics Handbook. It was one of the good 3.5 splats.
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Mar 15, 2023 06:42
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Splicer posted:People really underestimate how "legitimate" psychics were seen as in the 70s. While yes psychic hotlines and such are still a thing it's nowhere near what it used to be. We all owe James Randi an enormous debt. But part of the legacy of that nonsense is speculative fiction of the era treating psychic powers as Hard Future Science and that kind of didn't go away. I'm reminded of how Randi sued Pokemon, and that Pokemon also has humans with psychic powers in addition to Pokemon- in fact, nearly all iconic Psychic trainers are shown or implied to be psychic themselves, at least to a degree. That said, Pokemon is at least mildly a sci-fi setting with poo poo like teleporters and extradimensional storage being commonplace. I also love that bit about the setting, and how Psychic types and trainers are often compared with Fighting- both are practices that humans and Pokemon both do, and their Pokemon are their training partners. Plutonis posted:RE: Slavery on tabletop, is there any fantasy society that operated like the Mamluk Sultanate in real life? They operated on such a way that it is honestly stranger than fiction, with slaves being bought from far off lands like the Caucasus to Egypt and trained to become soldiers... But also they were the military elite of the country and even the Abbasid Caliphs were but puppets to the Mamluks. Funnily enough the closest equivalent I'm thinking of is Adeptus Astartes. They often literally recruit by rounding up the toughest and meanest pre-adolescents they can find in underhives and feudal worlds and then subjecting them to brainwashing, indoctrination and body modification, where the survivors become the warrior elite of the Imperium.
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Mar 15, 2023 06:57
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MonsieurChoc posted:There's a 5E Al-Qadim book!? https://www.dmsguild.com/product/341520/Campaign-Guide-Zakhara--Adventures-in-the-Land-of-Fate-AlQadim-and-Forgotten-Realms-Sourcebook
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Mar 15, 2023 07:05
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I'm reminded of how Randi sued Pokemon, and that Pokemon also has humans with psychic powers in addition to Pokemon- in fact, nearly all iconic Psychic trainers are shown or implied to be psychic themselves, at least to a degree. That said, Pokemon is at least mildly a sci-fi setting with poo poo like teleporters and extradimensional storage being commonplace. I also love that bit about the setting, and how Psychic types and trainers are often compared with Fighting- both are practices that humans and Pokemon both do, and their Pokemon are their training partners. Pretty certain it was Uri Geller who sued pokemon, because Kadabra's name in Japanese is Yungeraa and it has a spoon.
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Mar 15, 2023 08:09
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Captain Theron posted:Pretty certain it was Uri Geller who sued pokemon, because Kadabra's name in Japanese is Yungeraa and it has a spoon. Oh right, that's the one.
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Mar 15, 2023 08:29
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PurpleXVI posted:As someone who hasn't read that subsetting, mind sharing the core details of it? I ripped the lore chapter out ages ago, let me go dig it up EDIT: here it is; https://files.catbox.moe/uja1ak.pdf drrockso20 fucked around with this message at 08:36 on Mar 15, 2023 |
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Mar 15, 2023 08:33
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theironjef posted:no one gives a poo poo about it because they remember the OP brown splatbook from 2e and so on. No, I care because I remember that splatbook, which is why I always tell people to avoid D&D psionics because there's always some leftover of that curse in them.
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Mar 15, 2023 11:39
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PurpleXVI posted:No, I care because I remember that splatbook, which is why I always tell people to avoid D&D psionics because there's always some leftover of that curse in them.  but about psionics
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Mar 15, 2023 11:45
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KingKalamari posted:Oddly enough, I've actually been thinking about this topic a fair bit lately, what with my revisiting of old Wilderlands material which is a setting that included slavery as an institution and, at least in the 3.5 adaptation of the setting, included some eyebrow raising apologia for it. apropos of nothing, but i liked hearing about the prior art for the guilds in the discworld. it's neat how leiber wrote them as parody, they got taken seriously by other authors, then parodied again by pratchett
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Mar 15, 2023 12:16
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Siivola posted:I miss the Expanded Psionics Handbook. It was one of the good 3.5 splats. Yeah I felt like that book was the designers going "If we weren't beholden to Vancian Magic, this is how we would do it." I really wanted to run a campaign with no magic and just Psionics using this system.
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Mar 15, 2023 14:32
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theironjef posted:Yeah, definitely not, though that's probably because they didn't try as hard to integrate them into their base story as a lot of the other stuff. Monk at least will always have the easy fallback of "Martial Arts/unarmed" class, but stuff like Psionics was always pushed off to followup books, so it never gelled. At this point they have a solid idea of what D&D psionics are (we're on what, the third iteration of the Soul Knife?) but no one gives a poo poo about it because they remember the OP brown splatbook from 2e and so on. I know I do. That said, I don't miss a lot of it from back then. The overcomplicated rock paper scissors grid of attacks and defenses, etc., boo to that stuff. Not to be a jerk but I've been playing DnD in some form for almost 20 years at this point and I have no clue what the "OP brown splatbook from 2e" refers to, I highly doubt it's what the majority of players consider when deciding how they'll feel about Psionics in 5e
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Mar 15, 2023 15:39
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Countblanc posted:Not to be a jerk but I've been playing DnD in some form for almost 20 years at this point and I have no clue what the "OP brown splatbook from 2e" refers to, I highly doubt it's what the majority of players consider when deciding how they'll feel about Psionics in 5e poo poo, my brother is in his 30s, went to college, got a PhD, bought a house, got engaged, is going grey. The 2e splatboook came out before he was born. If you think that's what the majority, or even a statistically significant portion of D&D players remember, much less fixate on, then you should literally be crumbling to dust while you read this book, Methuselah.
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Mar 15, 2023 15:51
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Countblanc posted:Not to be a jerk but I've been playing DnD in some form for almost 20 years at this point and I have no clue what the "OP brown splatbook from 2e" refers to, I highly doubt it's what the majority of players consider when deciding how they'll feel about Psionics in 5e https://writeups.letsyouandhimfight.com/purplexvi/ad-and-d-2nd-edition/#14 I looked through it some for my 2e AD&D writeup.
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Mar 15, 2023 15:52
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:https://www.dmsguild.com/product/341520/Campaign-Guide-Zakhara--Adventures-in-the-Land-of-Fate-AlQadim-and-Forgotten-Realms-Sourcebook Dms guild has some really cool stuff. I'm not a 5e fan, but I love the fan works haha.
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Mar 15, 2023 15:55
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Toshimo posted:poo poo, my brother is in his 30s, went to college, got a PhD, bought a house, got engaged, is going grey. Used to be if you were an old whitebeard this hobby was where you could get some drat respect. And I was just responding to someone else that sounded even older, saying that people hate modern D&D psionics because it's not 70s enough and poo poo.
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Mar 15, 2023 15:56
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theironjef posted:Used to be if you were an old whitebeard this hobby was where you could get some drat respect. And I was just responding to someone else that sounded even older, saying that people hate modern D&D psionics because it's not 70s enough and poo poo. I'm 35, I started with 3.0. I just grew up reading weird sci-fi/fantasy. Actually I started with the old black and red boxed set with a solo adventure with a huge map and tokens where elves and dwarves were a class. My stepbrother had it lying around.
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Mar 15, 2023 16:01
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MonsieurChoc posted:I'm 35, I started with 3.0. I just grew up reading weird sci-fi/fantasy. I'm 42, which I assume is basically dead. I started in 2e but quickly went to AD&D because it was the only game I could find at the time. The old Complete splats were almost but not quite universally terrible, but the weirder ones like Psionics and Humanoids were at least really good lunch break reading.
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Mar 15, 2023 16:03
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I actually really like 4e Psionics. Had a blast running a couple Dark Sun adventures, using Heavy Metal and Blue Oyster Cult and poo poo as the soundtrack.
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Mar 15, 2023 16:04
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KingKalamari posted:Oddly enough, I've actually been thinking about this topic a fair bit lately, what with my revisiting of old Wilderlands material which is a setting that included slavery as an institution and, at least in the 3.5 adaptation of the setting, included some eyebrow raising apologia for it.
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Mar 15, 2023 16:07
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theironjef posted:I'm 42, which I assume is basically dead. I started in 2e but quickly went to AD&D because it was the only game I could find at the time. The old Complete splats were almost but not quite universally terrible, but the weirder ones like Psionics and Humanoids were at least really good lunch break reading. It was that perfectly 2e combination of absolutely useless and absolutely busted. And you needed it for dark sun, so...
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Mar 15, 2023 16:17
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