Dungeons and Dragons Rules Cyclopedia - Introduction

From the Back

Whether you're a player or Dungeon Master, the DUNGEONS & DRAGON Rules Cyclopedia is now the comprehensive sourcebook you need for the original fantasy role-playing game! For ages 12 and up, the Cyclopedia contains the complete game system and hundreds of features including:

• All the rules from the D&D Boxed Set series, including Basic, Expert, Companion, and Masters.
• Guidelines to develop and play characters from levels 1-36.
• Comprehensive lists of weaponry and equipment.
• Expansion rules including optional skills and talents.
• And overview of the Known World and HOLLOW WORLD game settings, the official D&D campaign world.
• Rules to convert D&D games and characters into AD&D 2nd edition game statistics and back again.
• Provides all the original monsters from the earlier boxed sets.

Expectations

I'm kind of dreading this one. It seems like it should just be a rehash of the three-and-a-half books I've already read before. But maybe the Cyclopedia will put a new perspective on the material, or at least rephrase it so I'm not going through exactly the same stuff as I did before.

But let's be real. This is going to be very similar to the books I've already read. At least I'll be able to find out what I missed in the Companion DM's book. 

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Earthdawn Gamemaster's Guide - Reaction

My main takeaway from The Earthdawn Gamemaster's Guide is that the decision to split the game into two volumes was not a fruitful one. Sure, it makes sense to keep the monster stats and magic items a secret, but I see no reason to segregate the climbing rules, and certain things, like the setting information do active harm to the game by being hidden away in a GM supplement.

Okay, so it's 2018, and it's highly unlikely that anyone is coming across Earthdawn 4th Edition by accident. I mean, I discovered it by accident, when I went into the local game store and saw it on their rpg shelf, but even then, it didn't have to sell me on the game. I knew right away what it was, and how improbable it was that I'd ever see it again. Still, if I'm imagining an alternate universe where these books were destined for the hands of an utter Earthdawn naif, then I have to question the wisdom of putting the game's main selling point - its incredible setting - into a book marked for GMs.

Because the setting information here really is quite good. It combines the familiar with the novel in a way that feels fresh. Like, it's a fantasy setting with elves and dwarves and whatnot, but dwarves are the most common race, outnumbering even humans. And the dwarf kingdom is underground, but that dovetails with the setting backstory in a really fruitful way. Of course, dwarves would have certain advantages in a world where all sapient life spent six of the last seven hundred years huddled in underground bunkers. And yet, aside from its exotic location, the Kingdom of Throal is portrayed in much the same terms as any fantasy kingdom - it is driven by profit and pride, but sometimes the idealists win. Just because they're a kingdom of dwarfs doesn't mean they're pigeonholed as the "dwarf kingdom." It's a remarkable bit of world-building.

But if I had to narrow the appeal of the setting down to one single element (which I don't have to, and really shouldn't - there's a lot of great stuff there), I'd say that what makes Earthdawn great is that it really manages to capture the sense of loss that comes with its post-apocalyptic setting. Lots of fantasy stories are set in the ruins of some prior, great civilization, but they often seem to use these ruins as a sort of adventuring loot box. Rarely are they engaged with as ruins - places that were once filled with activity and life, but which have since faded away.

The way Earthdawn establishes this is subtle. Take, for example, the broken kaers. Let's be real for a second. They're dungeons. They exist to be big, dangerous boxes full of thrilling monster fights and fabulous treasure. And they succeed in that. But, the plot of going into a kaer, clearing out the monsters, and retrieving the treasure also manages to be effortlessly affecting, even without further embellishment.

And it all comes down to one choice that seems obvious in retrospect, but which eluded me for years - Kaers are not mysterious. You never have to wonder "for what purpose did the ancients construct such an elaborate underground structure." You know it was to take refuge from an implacable enemy. And you never have to wonder "what fate befell the inhabitants that such a place would be abandoned to monsters." You know. The refuge failed.

But the trick Earthdawn pulls off is actually a two-step. Because Barsaive is not a bleak world, where people are constantly wailing in grief over a past that can never be reclaimed. The thing that most sells the sense of loss is that world is really quite the opposite. It's a world filled with hope. The people of Barsaive are rebuilding. The Horrors are in retreat. The evil empire suffered a major defeat. The dwarves of Throal were sincere when they said they were going to use their influence to liberate and unify, rather than rule. It's called Earthdawn for a reason. Tomorrow is going to be brighter than yesterday (with the help of the heroes, of course). The world has faced its darkest moment and survived. Life endures.

But then, sometimes, you come across a reminder of the people who didn't make it . . .

And that's what makes Earthdawn so great as a setting. And it's a shame that so little of that made it into the player-facing book. I'm glad that it's still somewhere, but I can't help but feel that the Player's and Gamemaster's Guides are less two stand-alone books, each serving a particular purpose and more two complementary volumes of a single work, that can't really function without each other. In fact, my theory at this point is that printing technology isn't really well suited to making a 1000-page book at 6"x9", so they arbitrarily split it in half to make it easier to manufacture.

Oh well, it doesn't much affect me on a personal level. I own both books and I was happy to read them. I may even put out feelers in my gaming group, see if anyone's interested in starting an Earthdawn game.

Ukss Contribution - I'm going to be cautious here and go with "cats can see into the astral." Such a picayune detail, doesn't especially help anyone but a Beastmaster character, and the only reason I even know about it is that the writers made the odd decision to include normal, non-combatant animals in their bestiary alongside Griffins and Unicorns.

So, you know, if you ever need to fight a mule, Earthdawn's got you covered. They don't have any magical powers or anything, but they are pretty good at carrying gear, so they could be armed with anything.

Seriously, though. The thing about cats seeing into the astral is a detail I really like. I enjoy it when fantasy games take real world superstition and make it function within the context of their rules.

Earthdawn Game Master's Guide - Introduction

From the Back

[Snip same 3 paragraphs that appeared on the back of the Player's Guide]

The Gamemaster's Guide provides rules and advice for running the Earthdawn game and includes an exploration of the lands of Barsaive, as well as numerous fantastic creatures and magical treasures to challenge and reward your players.

Expectations

The Player's Guide disappointed me a bit with its lack of setting information. The Gamemaster's Guide devotes 80 pages to history and setting (not counting the setting info that's surely in the creatures, dragons, and horrors chapters) so I'm optimistic about that. On the other hand, this book, like the first one, is huge. It's got to fill that word count with something, and if it's not high fantasy spectacle, it will be GMing advice and dry rules that is too rarely used to be included in a player reference.

In any event, Earthdawn is a game I've always had a soft spot for, despite not owning it until about two months ago. The best case scenario is that I'm inspired to buy a whole bunch of old supplements off Amazon. (Some might call it the worst case scenario, but I'm a slow learner).

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Dungeons and Dragons Gazetteers - Reaction

The Grand Duchy of Karameikos

I went into this batch of books with a certain skepticism, and The Grand Duchy of Karameikos did not disappoint in that regard. I was expecting a by-the-numbers D&D fantasy setting, and what I got was even less fantastic than that.

Don't get wrong, the book is still useful, if you ever needed a serviceable starter kingdom, predominantly run by humans (so much so that the fantasy races could be excised neatly without changing much of anything) and low magic. It describes several medieval-style towns and gives a rundown of all the major figures of the Duke's court. And there's a historically-based ethnic tension that could serve as the driver of a lot of plots.

But . . . nope, no buts. If you were hoping for early D&D high fantasy weirdness, there isn't any. Not even any mention of water termites. Okay, it introduced two new monsters, one of which is kind of weird. The chevall is a sort of . . . were-centaur? It's a creature that mostly runs around in horse form, but can change into a centaur if it sees horses being threatened. The other new creature was the nosferatu. As near as I can tell, it exists only to be a stealth errata for the D&D vampire ("[it] strongly resembles the vampire. However, the Nosferatu does not drain energy levels. It drinks blood.")

The best things about The Grand Duchy of Karameikos are its seriousness and attention to detail. The most entertaining thing about it was Baron Ludwig von Hendriks. I'd already encountered him once before, in Lathan's Gold (which I only now realize covered the entire south coast of "The D&D World," not just Ierendi). He was the asshole who kidnapped my girlfriend for a ransom of unrefined gold. He lives in a castle called Fort Doom.

I think the author of this book might have hated the character. It depicts him very bizarrely. Like, even in-setting he is "bizarre" and "theatrical". The origin story of Fort Doom is that Ludwig von Hendriks was the Duke's cousin and was granted the title of Baron, but despite being the lawful ruler of the village of Halag, he came in with an army and conquered it anyway (actual quote - "he didn't need to conquer it . . . but he wanted to conquer something.") and then renamed it Fort Doom. The canonical reason for why he's allowed to get away with it is that his deeds are so over-the-top that the Duke assumes the reports are exaggerated.

So there you have it. A mostly down-to-earth fantasy setting, so restrained in its use of magic that you could slot it into a historical game with only minimal modification, and also it's home to a cartoonish, scenery-chewing supervillain.

UKSS Contribution: It has to be Baron von Hendriks. A guy who straight-up relishes in his own villainy and lives his life like a romantic diva? He could be equally ill-at-home in any genre.

The Emirates of Ylaruam

I was worried this book would be really racist, but it turns out that it was merely blithely sexist. Don't panic. It's not the worst case scenario. Fantasy Arabia, in the wrong hands, could have been very bad. The Emirates of Ylaruam's cardinal sin is that women are nearly completely invisible. There are zero named female characters, and while I didn't keep a running count, as near as I can tell, the only specific female character at all is a woman who buys some magic makeup after being tricked by an evil alchemist (but who doesn't actually figure into the subsequent adventure, which is about retrieving the makeup for a good alchemist). The character creation page does have example female names . . . marked by an asterisk because they're mixed in with a whole lot more male names.

It's weird. Even for the time, it's weird. Both The Grand Duchy of Karameikos and The Kingdom of Ierendi were much better about this. The Duchy had a Duchess and the Kingdom had a Queen, so even by the bare minimum standards, the Emirates fell behind, but then they each had female ambassadors and shop owners and city administrators, and even some female adventurers. All books written in 1987, but only two out of the three seemed to remember that half of the human species even exists. Counting points off for that. Bad form.

I wish I was more of an expert on Orientalism, because I'm curious about how this is influenced by the book's subject matter. Not to put too fine a point on it, but harems are conspicuous in their absence, and I wonder if that was less an oversight and more a deliberate excision. Certainly, the cover of the book is well aware of the existence of the trope. And if you're in 1987, writing about fantasy Arabia, and you're cutting out harems, than maybe there's no other mental connection you have between Arabs and women.

I've got to figure that someone, somewhere, made a call. Because when we look at Ylaruam's treatment of its male characters it's . . . okay. Not great, but okay. They invented fantasy Islam to underpin the region's culture. Which makes perfect sense. You can't have medieval Arabia without Islam. It's so influential that you leave a huge void if you just take it out. But that raises the uncomfortable question - what is fantasy Europe's analogue to Catholicism?

That's the main flaw of this book (aside from the women thing) - it makes specific things that are maybe a bit more general. Like, there's roleplaying advice that basically boils down to "characters will act rashly if challenged on their machismo, because the region's warrior-ethic is rooted in a highly performative masculinity" and my main thought was "where was all this when we were talking about Karameikos."

Guys, did you know the people of Ylaruam take their religion seriously, consider it rude if you jump straight into business without engaging in small talk first, and believe it's important to be hospitable? Wow, what a strange and mysterious people.

Okay, I've ragged on this book enough. It actually does a pretty good job of sketching out a setting and making it feel real. So maybe the problem is less that its editorial focus makes common things seem exotic and more that other books take a lot of stuff for granted.

And if you put aside the political angle, The Emirates of Ylaruam follows in the tradition of The Grand Duchy of Karameikos in being a serviceable workhorse of a book that mostly eschews magic and high fantasy for a grounded pseudo historical realism. It devotes roughly twice the word count to water management policy than it does to genies. Which, okay. It's not what I want from a roleplaying game, but I respect it. You can pick up this book and within minutes have a perfectly unremarkable Arab-inspired town, complete with beggars, barbers, and rival tribes, that's ready to be slotted into nearly any appropriate campaign. It may not make for the most compelling reading, but it does spare the DM a lot of scut work.

UKSS Contribution: The Roc. It's not used in an especially unusual way here - She attacks a village after the inhabitants steal her egg. But hey, the classics are classics for a reason.

The Kingdom of Ierendi

Moving on from fantasy Arabia to fantasy Hawaii. And people, this is bedrock D&D weirdness. It goes off the rails almost instantly and it never gets back on. I can't even figure out how this tracks with the previous two supplements, because it doesn't seem like remotely the same world. In Ylaruam you've got people sipping coffee and pointedly not discussing financial transactions, and in Karameikos you've got them stoking ethnic tensions as cover for their criminal syndicate, and meanwhile, over in Ierendi, you've got adventuring-based tourism, civic government, and religion.

This is not me being hyperbolic and reading more into the text than intended. The King and Queen of Ierendi are literally chosen by a process known as "The Royal Tournament of Adventurers." Once a year, the ministers of Ierendi set up mock dungeons, stock them with monsters, and hopeful contestants run through them, being judged by the mysterious criteria of "The Tribunal" and the highest-scoring man and woman get to be the King and Queen for the year.

And the economy of Ierendi is based on tourism. Given the numbers provided by the book, hundreds of thousands of people visit the islands each year. And one of the more popular attractions is Gastenoo's World of Adventure on Safari Island (so much so that it spawned a dozen imitators). In these parks, special magic items are used that absorb all damage directed at their wearers, while simultaneously announcing the wounds they would have received. Combined with weapons enchanted to stun, rather than kill, visitors to these parks go through carefully scripted scenarios "based on fairy tales, heroic legends, and ancient myths."

I . . . don't . . . even.

Wrap it up people. It turns out we've all been living in a world that reached peak irony back in 1987.

I'm not sure how this is meant to be used. Why am I taking a heroic legend and using it as the basis for a game within a game? If the players were interested in roleplaying the legend, couldn't I, you know, just make that the basis of the game? What's my pitch, here? "Hey, do you guys want to play D&D, but with a framing device where you're in the Enterprise's holodeck?"

But apparently, thousands, nay tens of thousands, of people in the D&D world do this every year.

And as for the religion . . . well, that I am reading into a bit. I'll let the book's own words describe it:

One message on the stones has not changed at all. Tomia, the Hope, wrote of a great treasure . . . [It] will be found, according to the Immortals, when the People's Temple's need is greatest. Not even the Temple officials know when this will be, so a continual search for the treasure is conducted by the Temple priests and by individual followers of the Temple.

Temple officials strongly encourage adventurers to increase their proficiencies and to someday achieve the level of Immortal. They do this in hopes that the great treasure will be revealed to them.

So, the doctrine of Ierendi's most popular religion is that you should gain levels and look for treasure. Imagine me giving a very pointed hmmmm.

I guess my takeaway from the Kingdom of Ierendi is that I have a very poor intuitive sense of what the beginning of Dungeons and Dragons must have been like. To me, 1987 is still very early D&D, too early, I'd think, to start with the whole, jaded "adventuring is kind of like extreme sports" idea. Hell, real sports hadn't even gotten to that stage yet. It feels like learning that there was a punk rock band in 1965.

I'm not saying I don't like it. I'd tweak a few things, put the islands in a setting where people actually go on expensive island vacations, maybe just up the tech level generally, but as a concept, it works. On the other hand, if I'm working at TSR in the mid-80s, I would never have approved the manuscript. Gazetteer 4 is too early in the run to start parodying your own setting.

UKSS Contribution: There is a village of albinos that believe they can attract their gods to the mortal realm by building magnificent houses for them. They do this by building mansions out of sand (the primary material available at the beach) and then using secret alchemy to harden the sand into a durable structure.

I'll take the sand-hardening potion. Leave the stuff about the cult of albinos.

PS: I'm writing this about a year after the original post. I linked to this one from The Complete Book of Humanoids because I remembered a detail from Ylaruam that was relevant to the discussion - in the village, there's a tainted well. It's cursed because there are a bunch of undead lizard-folk down there. It didn't merit much mentioning at the time of the initial post, but apparently it stuck with me for months afterwards. Funny what you remember.

Three Dungeons and Dragons Gazetteers - Introduction

What Are These

Dungeons and Dragons had a series of thin books that described various locations in its default setting. The Grand Duchy of Karameikos is used for example adventures in the Expert rulebook. The Kingdom of Ierendi showed up in Lathan's Gold. And a quick internet search shows that the Emirates of Ylarum are original to the book.

In terms of old-school supplements, these are the real shit. The covers are gorgeous in that mid-80's overwrought fantasy way. And you can bet your life that all the ladies are staring sleepily into the distance while having implausibly deep cleavage and the men are all doing heroic action poses with lovingly detailed fantastic weaponry.

The back covers of Karameikos and Ylarum both promise a "complete historical, economical, geographical, and sociological overview" of their respective areas. Whereas by Ierendi, they'd mellowed a bit and focused more on pitching the adventure. 1987 must have been a very busy year at TSR.

Expectations

I think the trickiest thing about tackling these is that they are from before the time when their brand of fantasy became boring. Like, the Grand Duchy of Karameikos looks like peak D&D fantasy. I'm expecting heroic knights, rampaging goblins, and aloof wizards. Maybe there will be some mysterious elves that live in a forest and some taciturn dwarves that live in the mountains.

Ylarum looks like it's going to be benignly racist in that old-school orientalist way, where the author is really enthusiastic about the subject matter, but engages with it through a colonialist lens. Though to be fair to the author, this impression comes mostly from the cover, which feature two men in Keffiyehs, with covered faces, a harem dancer, and a beautiful woman with a veiled face. The rest is just an educated guess.

Ierendi is harder to pin down, at least from the book's cover. It's the one I'm most optimistic about, just because it gives off a purer sword and sorcery vibe than the others (though, the phrase "psychotic natives" appears on the back cover, which is never a good sign).

Despite my cynicism, I'm prepared to be surprised by any or all of these. The advantage of predating the genre it created is that there's still room for the ideas that got dropped in the process of working out the common denominator. The D&D rulebooks themselves were filled with all sorts of bizarre ideas that were largely forgotten. Here's hoping the setting books are early enough to share that sense of experimentation.

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Earthdawn Player's Guide - Reaction

My biggest complaint about the Earthdawn Player's Guide stems from the thing I enjoy most about it. See, in Earthdawn, you play an Adept, a person who uses magic to perform phenomenal feats of skill. Warrior Adepts strike harder than a charging bull. Thief Adepts skulk through the shadows with preternatural grace. My absolute favorite is the Sky Raider talent that lets them negate their falling damage and jump from airships in a precision aerial assault. That's both a neat bit of world-building and a cool image on its own.

There are fifteen Adept "Disciplines" (ie character classes), covering a variety of heroic archetypes. And I like that a lot. My complaint is that a significant portion, 4 out of 15, of the Disciplines are spellcasters and taken together, they undermine the Adept system in ways I'm not sure it can recover from.

Don't get me wrong. Wizards and Elementalists and Illusionists and Nethermancers fit well into the Earthdawn setting, and it is both appropriate and wise to include them as character options. It's just, the portion of the book given over to spells and spellcasting is 95 pages. The portion of the book devoted to all of the other talents for all fifteen Disciplines (including those belonging to the four spellcasting Disciplines) is 64 pages. One quarter of the Disciplines gets one and half times more wordcount than the other three quarters combined.

It bugs me. On the one hand, the book is saying "magic permeates this world and is used in a variety of activities and fields, rather than being sequestered away in the dusty old tomes of specialists" and then it immediately walks that back by putting most of the flashiest special effects into the dusty old tomes of specialists.

It's not that spellcasters are necessarily more effective than other Disciplines. In fact, I'm fairly sure that given the xp sink that spells represent, nearly every Discipline is going to be better at its niche. It feels like a missed opportunity to give other fantasy archetypes a greater diversity of wondrous feats.

But that's a fairly minor complaint. Overall, I would call the Discipline system a success and my whining merely an aesthetic preference. The only thing that I'd call out as a flaw is the "step system" method of determining dice pools.

The way it works is that your attribute and talent ratings combine to give you a "step" and then various bonuses and penalties (such as equipment, magic, or the specific maneuver you're attempting) can raise or lower your step. Your final step determines what dice you roll, as indicated by a chart near the beginning of the book. At the low levels, it's fairly intuitive. Step 4 is 1d6. Step 5 is 1d8. Step 6 is 1d10. And so on. But then, once you start rolling multiple dice, it gets a little hard to follow. Step 28 is 1d20 + 1d12 + 2d8. Step 29 is 1d20 + 1d12 + 1d10 + 1d8. And step 30 is 2d20 + 2d6. There's a logic to it, but realistically, you're going to have to be checking that chart constantly.

I think you'd get used to it, though. And it would be worth it to do so. Earthdawn as a setting as a lot of great fantastic conceits that make it a one-of-a-kind experience. It is the only fantasy rpg I can think of that is explicitly post-apocalyptic. Most others have a vaguely sketched out disaster that ended a previous golden age, but in Earthdawn, that disaster is within living memory and the current society is the first and second generation descendants of people who huddled for safety in underground bunkers while ravenous Horrors scoured the surface of all life. There's even a location called Bartertown, which I have to assume is a deliberate homage.

Other things I like are Blood Elves, a group of elves whose magical protection against the Scourge failed and in desperation turned to blood magic to cause living thorns to grow inside their bodies, depriving the Horrors of the opportunity to derive sustenance from their suffering. Or the Sea of Death, which is an ocean of open lava, where specially shielded airships fly over it to harvest pure elemental fire. Or that trolls get around the fact that they are too big to ride horses by domesticating dinosaurs.

It's very cool, and honestly I wish there was more of it here in this book. The explicit setting chapter is less than 15 pages long, and much of the feel of the game has to come from examples, chapter quotes, and the odds and ends sprinkled throughout the book. I feel like 1st edition maybe did it better, but that was a long time ago, and I may be remembering the past with rose-colored glasses. (Sadly, I don't have any 1st edition Earthdawn books, probably my most regrettable collecting oversight).

UKSS Contribution - This is a tough one, but I'm going to have to go with sealed kaers. It's mentioned a couple of times throughout the book that not everyone has emerged from their magical bunkers yet. Even now, decades after the Scourge has ended. I think it would be cool to have a couple of those in the World of Ukss, even if the thing they're hiding from has to be changed.

Earthdawn Player's Guide - Introduction

From the Back Cover
An age of magic once existed in our world. Lost to history, this time is remembered in the echoes of myth and legend. Humans lived alongside the other Namegiver races: Dwarf and Elf, Troll and Ork, Windling, T'Skrang, and Obsidiman. The wild places of the world were home to griffins, shadowmants, and other fantastic beasts.

The land was once besieged by the horrors, foul creatures from the depths of astral space that sought to feed upon and destroy all that was living and good. Their time, the time of the scourge, has passed and the people have returned to the surface, reclaiming the lands that were once their home.

Brave heroes band together to explore the land of Barsaive, fighting the horrors that remain and protecting their homes from those that would enslave them.

The Player's Guide Provides you with the rules for playing characters from first to eighth circle, with all the talents, spells, and other tools needed to forge your own legends in the Earthdawn roleplaying game.

Expectations
I have a friend who lent me the old FASA version, many years ago. I thought it was a great setting and I especially loved all the clever easter-egg connections to Shadowrun. From what I understand, those are no more, due to the severing of the licenses, but I still like the exotic fantasy races, strange magic, and undercurrent of melancholy that characterize the setting as a whole.

This particular book is an absolute brick, more than 500 pages long. I hope that means that there will be a lot of juicy setting detail, though my worry is that the system will be really finicky and complicated.

Either way, there are sure to be long, dry stretches.I've got to prepare myself emotionally to power through.

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