Interesting stuff from last week's trip through the gaming web.
D4: The Church of Lolth Ascendant
Do you want to use the official background on Lolth and Drow in your campaign but what a different twist? Tim Brannan over at The Other Side has written up Lolth as misunderstood and betrayed but not evil. The evil of the Drow is mixed of justified and perversion of the faith by mortals. While the core ideas might not be 100% original the execution is inspiring? How inspiring you ask? While Tim provides write-ups for multiple editions of D&D and D20 Modern I couldn't help but think of Runequest, specifically second edition. If you are interested in running what used to be called a Gateway campaign in a D&D type fantasy universe converting this to a RQ cult write-up could be quite a campaign centerpiece.
D6:Building the Perfect Class
I mentioned Erin Smale's article when I discussed culture specific character classes. It is based on the Rules Cyclopedia with both major optional rules, weapons mastery and secondary skills, in place. As such, its calculations will be a bit off if you aren't using these rules. Also, given the actual XP values were around long before Mentzer wrote his version of D&D so I think Smale puts too much faith in the ability to extract values. That said, of the three systems I know for calculating values I like this one, with a couple of my own tweaks, the best.
D8:The Changing Aesthetics of D&D
I found Trollsmyth's discussion of how Third Edition's art reflected its differences from First Edition by a double back track. James Raggi IV referred to his old post on art while discussing the economic realities of his new boxed set project. In his art post James pointed to a couple of other art posts including our roll on the D8. While now over three years old I still find it informative not just about art but as a window into the mind of the OSR.
Just three die rolls this week in part because this is a spur of the moment idea. However, I'm announcing this as my blog's first honest to goodness regular feature so I'll be taking notes this week on where my gaming reading goes.
Just saw this link to Building the Perfect Class - thanks for the write-up.
ReplyDeleteI agree about the XP results. As I noted in the accompanying PDF, it's very unlikely that my method is even similar to whatever class-building procedure the original designers used. Further, because I validated against the RC, there's an admitted (potential) incompatibility with any previous version.
If you're using this method with the RC, I'd say it's probably usable as-is. If you're playing an earlier version of D&D, you may need some tweaks. Speaking of...what tweaks have you applied?
Thanks again.
There are only two major changes I'm using. I separated out scroll reading from magical casting for cleanliness plus it allows for magic-users without a scroll ability (a witch would fit for example). The other is I'm using zero instead of 400 for the weapon mastery in games without that rule.
ReplyDeleteNext week we should see my first class: Initiates of Mithras.
Makes sense. Had it not been for the thief ability, reading scrolls would not have been parsed out. And for games that don't use weapon mastery, zeroing out the ability works, provided you do it for all new and existing classes.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the detail - good luck with Initiates of Mithras.