All you're missing is A Thief's Tale.  Guildhouse had a book called Quirks & Nuances scheduled for release but as far as I know it never actually came out.  As the title implies it detailed a flaw/merit system for d20.  I don't really know anything about the company except that they died pretty early on in the d20 glut.  Their first four modules were released in a shrinkwrap discount set called Gatekeeper's Adventure Bundle.

Two of the nicest D20 hardbacks I've ever seen just arrived in the mail.

I got a copy of Expedition to the Demonweb Pits, from Wizards of the Coast, from a seller on Amazon.  This is a really cool adventure...with excellent maps and the Demonweb storyline blocked out in a logical, playable manner.  Even the rumpled end sheets of this book are cool.  This is some of the best work I have read from Wolfgang Bauer.

In returning to a classic module, Bauer and his co-writer, Gwendolyn Kestrel, have managed both to improve the original and create a nice homage to the first of the multi-color cover old-school modules.  With the power of the 3.5 rules, the module gives players so many cool things to kill this adventure can't go wrong.  There are also lots of roleplaying opportunities even among the hideous beings of the Abyss.  At 225 pages, this is a hefty module that could easily have been worth the $34.95 cover price...when calculated in GTHFPD (Game Table Hours of Fun Per Dollar Units).

One of the quirks of D20 modules of this size is that they are not just modules.  They also have material like new monsters, magic items and even spells wedged in around adventures and adventure hooks that can be played out in any order and with multiple styles.  Sometimes, this can get annoying, especially when half the book gets wasted in spells and (my favorite) "new rules you don't really need."  Expedition to the Demonweb Pits has just enough of this information not to lower its value.  

Dreadmire, meanwhile, succeeds by excess.  It has interesting adventures to be found inside, but it is sold as "The only swamp sourcebook you will ever need." And so it is....

Dreadmire, by Spellbinder Games, is a work of imagination that exceeded my expectations by far.  The sheer volume of inventions in this book makes it worth the cover price...never mind the bargain price I paid.   Author Randy Richards basically poured every idea a good DM could come up with in 15+ years into a book that is obviously a labor of love.  The artwork rocks (think Fiend Folio, only done well).  

For an example of the density of material in this 224 page book, check out page 221...which is a chart that gives the letters of the alphabet in 15 real and imaginary alternative languages.  The result is not a linguist's triumph...but it is just the sort of nutty thing a true gamer-geek loves.  That is only one example of the monsters, spells, rules and other crunchy bits in this book.  

One nice touch...there is a gold sticker inside the front cover that tells the buyer how to get bonus material on the www.Dreadmire.com website. This was obviously slapped into each book by hand after printing was done...exactly how it used to be done in the old days.  The free bonus  material can also be found by going directly to RPGNow...which is where the link in the book now takes you.

One other detail about both books worth...um...detailing:  Both books have solid binding.  I had expected Dreadmire to explode in my hands (as too many of its D20 hardback brethren do as soon as you subject them to the incredibly cruel process of opening them).  I was pleasantly surprised.

I don't know what the texture of the dark blue end sheets of Expedition to the Demonweb Pits should be called.  The high-quality paper used lends strongly to the overall creepy feel of the product.

Anyway, both are nice examples of the D20 collectible products that are on the market right now for very low prices.  These are the books that they'll be cursing themselves over 20 years from now..."Why didn't I snap those up when they were lying around everywhere for under five bucks?"

Dreadmire has some 'history' behind it, I think its still on the Necromancer Games forums if you look.  The author had a falling out as it were.

ShaneG.

Badmike wrote:
The author is well-known in gaming circles for "borrowing" ideas from other authors and passing them off as his own. From what I remember, Dreadmire was going to be a Necromancer project until he was again accused of "borrowing" some of the monsters and character classes, and they dropped him like a hot potato.  The book is basically self-published as a result. I'd like to flip through a copy someday, though.

Mike B.

Well, that was certainly an interesting read over on the Necromancer forums.  

I must, however, claim total innocence in my review of Dreadmire.  I was completely unaware of any controversy.  

If there was material taken from some Greyhawk publication then it is hidden deep in a very densely packed book.  Without taking sides in the legal ugliness, I do stand by my favorable review of the book itself.  It's too bad there were intellectual property violations and other bad behavior...the book didn't need to steal stuff to be good.

I don't know if the legal spat and the copyright violation controversy makes the book less collectible or more collectible.  I tend to come down on the side of more...I think some people will regret not getting hold of a copy.

It is interesting how closely linked the online D&D community really is.  Within our internet niche, everyone seems to know someone who knows someone else.....Six Degrees of Frank Mentzer.  

It doesn't pay to be on the bad side of the online gaming community.  Whatever Randy Richards did obviously landed him there...and apparently he was not the kind of person to just go quietly.  

Too bad.

SoulCatcher78 wrote:The RPG industry has a history of "blood feud" behavior.  When there're only so many members of a club, they're bound to choose sides in a conflict.  Once they do, it get's personal really quick.

What's that you said about my sister?

ashmire13 wrote:I like the sounds of this Dreadmire book! I'll have to keep an eye out for it now...  

Here are a few options:



http://cgi.ebay.com/D-D-d20-Dreadmire-S ... .m20.l1116



http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/ ... ition=used

Reading a post on the www.dreadmire.com forum, there is a post about the whole being accused of plagiarism.  Another post also mentions that Esdevium distributed the book in the UK so there should be copies floating around there.  A Dreadmire novel has also been released in PDF too.

I just got a pair of related D20 books in the mail.  They are the 3rd Edition version of Oriental Adventures and the Rokugan Campaign Setting for Legend of the Five Rings D20 by Alderac Entertainment Group.

The two books are virtually companion volumes and had to have been coordinated as a license by both companies.

I admit...I opened Oriental Adventures very carefully.  I was worried that the pages might go off like a grenade in my face when I opened the cover.  The original Oriental Adventures had binding roughly as tight as a not very tight thing on Not Very Tight Island on the Great Night of the Not Very Tight Things.  It is rare, today, to see an Oriental Adventures from the early 80's that does not have a thrashed binding.  But the third one stayed up!

The Rokugan Campaign suffers just a bit from a much too tightly-controlled character generation system, based on the campaign's background of rival clans in the Rokugan Empire.  Essentially, you choose a clan, or don't choose a clan, out of the book and that guides your character's destiny.  It isn't bad, it's just....involved.

Oriental Adventures manages to avoid some of the pitfalls of its earlier incarnation.  For instance, it doesn't have a line in the armor section that says, "...unless you are swinging at an unarmored part of the body."  It also doesn't have character classes that are all more powerful than their Western D&D counterparts.  The book is helped in this by the 3rd Edition concept of "prestige classes" which help explain how the Asian warriors get special powers their Western counterparts somehow cannot figure out how to do.  

The monsters in both books are wierd and scarey.  Just strange enough to give the right flavor for the setting.

Kudos to the Alderac Entertainment Group for using the end sheets to print two copies of the campaign's most essential map! Hell, kudos to them just for figuring out that a good map is essential for using the product.  There are enough companies around that cannot seem to figure that out...

This is the first Legend of the Five Rings product I've acquired.  I am not clear on which publications were for Alderac's LOFR role-playing game and which ones were for the d20 system.  Like most everything Alderac does, this is an impressive book.  I haven't picked up anything from LOFR before because I associate the name with collectible card games...which all must die.  

Since I got two books like this in one lot for 99 cents plus shipping (hoot!), I'm pretty happy.

What I wonder about these books is.......has anyone actually played them?  Someone must have bought the Legend of the Five Rings books because there certainly are a lot of them floating around Half-Price Books.

Even back in the day, I saw a lot of Samurai characters (or, rather...bushi characters, since that class was a total rape and run on the fighter class) but I never actually heard of anyone who played a campaign.  If someone played Oriental Adventures back in the day, did they actually use the honor rules as printed in the book?

Oh, yeah....and how many power gamers here used the martial arts system in the Oriental Adventures book to build a rockin' martial artist?  The trick was to start as a monk and then switch to bushi.  That tactic allowed the PC to basically grab an entire martial art style at first level, and then ditch all the hit point and combat limitations that made AD&D monks so problematic...and then rape and run the fighter class as a bushi.  (Insert the word "sucked" in there somewhere with the AD&D monk class.)

Now I suppose someone will log on and tell me that the writers of the Rokugan Campaign book ripped off Vault of the Drow and got exiled from Alderac Entertainment Group....and then maintained a vicious long-range online snipe fest for the next two years....anyone?  

FormCritic wrote:
I advise lurking Dreadmire for a while on Ebay.  I paid a lot less than that for my copy.

The guy who sold me my copy had the ebay handle of Spellbindergames, but he claimed not to be associated with the author in any way...just selling off stock he got for cheap. (I had asked him to autograph the book for me.)  

The seller gave me a second chance offer at $3.99....which was my losing bid on a previous auction.

I bought mine from that Ebay seller, and iirc it was signed.  I did get two sales sheets with it I know (have them listed in my Excel file).

Course about the recent two books you bought..nah you don't want to know...and really I don't know anything wrong about them, you just set yourself up for me to respond that way.

ShaneG.