Posts made by The Tree of Woe

Which is actually from the 2E timeline - all the characters you choose from were the Lords of Waterdeep at that time.

You could run a FR MU* based out of Waterdeep using more or less just the City of Splendors boxed set and the old Undermountain stuff.

@Coin LOL LOVECRAFT.

He's a necromancer lich whose claim to fame was creating a magical preservative spell so he wouldn't get all nasty because for some reason in a kingdom ruled by evil wizards being outed as a lich would be a... social faux pas?

Honestly in a setting like FR where you could flip over a rock and find an archmage, the dude is/was kind of an also-ran, though most of them are dead and he's still kicking around.

http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Red_Wizards_of_Thay

In the 4E timeline, their Grand Poobah of Necromancy launched a coup and kicked everybody else out, and they sort of/kind of face turned? The rest of the Zulkirs stopped him from becoming a god, died in the process, and now the Red Wizards are... magic item peddlers and wizards for hire? I guess?

Crossover with what?

Also, I'm not really sure the whole "no veil of secrecy" is jiving with me. I don't want to play Harry Dresden and list my character under "Wizard" in the directory.

@Bobotron said:

@The-Tree-of-Woe
That sucks. Of course, my favorite location in the Realms is the Moonshae Isles. Celtic land FTW.

"After the Spellplague House Kendrick lost much of their control over the isles. In 1479 DR much of the isle of Alaron was ruled by House Kendrick, although the King's forces did not control the entire island. The Isle of Snowdown was controlled by the vampire Lady Erliza Daressin who was loyal to Amn. The Isle of Gwynneth was controlled by the Kingdom of Sarifal which was ruled by High Lady Ordalf. A tribe of Fomorians crossed from the Feywild into Faerûn after the Spellplague and took control of the island of Oman. The isle of Moray was under the control of Malarite lycanthropes."

I guess that's not... terrible. It's plottage, at least. You could run a not altogether shitty campaign about helping House Kendrick take back the islands.

Now to be fair, a lot of those areas were also less explored, and if they'd gotten rid of one or two of them and not almost all of them I would've said "okay."

Instead they stripped all the diversity out of a setting known for it so they could have a kingdom of orcs who ain't so bad, and Dragonborn.

@HelloRaptor Sarcastic response: If it's not white, eurocentric, and would fit in World of Warcraft, gone.

Actual response: If it's not white, eurocentric, and would fit in World of Warcraft, gone.

Chult? Native civilizations wiped out.

Halruaa: Exploded.

Luiren: Caught in the shockwaves of Halruaa exploding.

Mulhorand: Swallowed up by some resurgent shit from Netheril, completely expunged.

Maztica: Whole continent replaced so they could have Dragonborn.

Al-Qadim and Kara-Tur didn't get touched on, mostly because the FR 4e writers didn't have time to bring them to ruin to add in the kingdom of blue-skinned elves who are often druids but totally not a WoW-rip.

Depends I suppose. Your candy's certainly better.

@Cobaltasaurus Lucy is making noises about wanting to get the ownership issues settled so she can get the band back together and do more Xena. A TV movie, at least.

It won't be the same without Ares, though...

I will say, I wish some of our ingredient standards were as stringent as Canada's.

On the other hand, Canadians cross the border into Buffalo to go shopping for meat, no shit.

American society still has a frontier philosophy about food. Eat all you can and eat it fast, because you need to get back to work and you might not get to eat again until tomorrow. Compounded by the Depression, when for a lot of people it was "who knows when you'll get to eat again period."

When you have that mentality toward food combined with an abundance unprecedented in human history... yeah. It's changing, but slowly.

I like food too much myself. Sigh.

I mean, if I ran FR, I'd definately be using the 2E timeline, because the ass-end of 3.5's events were craptastic, and the 4E writers stripped anything out of the setting that wasn't white and eurocentric. It was an absolute travesty.

I admit the idea of Birthright has always intrigued me, mostly because it has mechanics for titles and estates other settings don't.

@Arkandel I'm an eccentric man, yes. I mean, I asked about AD&D in this place for God's sake.

@Thenomain - I'd eat dirt before I played with you anyway.

It either completely protects people from all consequence or it's meaningless because there are added loopholes which can allow people to jack up the Risk regardless of what another player would like.

TL;DR, it's a shitty and ineffective policy instituted by games that want to try to go the "No GMs" route, itself a shitty idea.

Well, somewhere along the line for awhile (5e's attempted to reinforce the point) it became lost that hit points are an abstraction and that one "attack" for the round is actually a sequence of blows and parries.

THAC0 was nice because it revolved around a fixed point which was influenced one way by strength, weapon bonuses, etc. and the other by dexterity, armor, etc. Your level gain just changed where the fixed point was.

Of course, I still believe in re-rolling initiative every round.

Would anybody be interested in playing a game of AD&D 2E over Roll20 or the like? It remains my edition of choice, and when I went back to my DMG I remembered just how good it was, and how even the things people pooh-pooh as too complicated (like THAC0) had an elegance that made them easy enough for a 10 year-old to grasp.

Suggestions for game worlds are also appreciated, but I'll ki-bosh a couple:

Forgotten Realms, not because I dislike it, but because I like it too much and I want to branch out.

Ravenloft, because I play too much WoD anyway.

I'm also not opposed to creating a setting out of whole cloth.

Over at Eldritch, the Demons are doing a really crappy job keeping on top of their shit, yo. If this was vampire stuff somebody would've yelled "MASQ BREACH" and we would've been like fucking fire ants.

Geist and Demon can fight it out for which of its meta-settings are more obnoxious because when they're included on a multi-genre game, you can't seem to ignore them.