Yora
2015-02-20, 04:11 PM
There's always plenty of talk how there were lots books released with the d20 label, but which were generally considered pretty bad, and more recently there's the whole OSR thing which is also enabled by the OGL.
I was wondering, out of this supposedly huge pile of terrible releases, which gems have you found that you actually liked, used, and consider quite good. For practical reasons let's exclude Pathfinder here, as it has been pretty firmly established that this product line has been commercially successful and gained a huge and pretty stable following of fans.
I really quite love the Midnight setting. It's a setting that got over half a dozen of books and quite specifically meant to be played with D&D 3rd edition. It has a new magic system and prestige classes, as well as some feats and spells, but leaves all the basics to the "standard rules". Pretty much everyone who knows this setting and described it calls it "Imagine if Sauron had won." The good gods had cast the Evil God out of heaven, but had not anticipated that this violation of the cosmic order completely shut down all the borders between the different worlds and had the Evil God land in the world of mortals. With the other gods having no way to interfer in the world of mortals, he could do whatever he wanted. Which was to gather all orcs and goblins under him and conquer the rest of the world. In more detail, I've seen people describe the setting as a fantasy world modeled after Eastern Europe under Nazi occupation. There are some kind of minor witches and druids, but all clerics serve the Evil God. Really quite cool and I think the descision to make the books as addons to the D&D rulebooks was quite wise.
I am also a fan of the Conan d20 game, though I feel very ambigous about it. I think there were like 20 books or so for it, and many of them quite great. The second edition (based on 3.5e) has really excelent production values. The only real problem I have with the game is that Conan (and the Sword & Sorcery genre in general) are very unsuited for the d20 system. Or the other way round, the d20 system is a rather poor choice to make a Conan game. All the classes are a bit different and magic is very different, but under the hood it's the old thing with 20 character levels, BAB, skills, and feats.
But I very much love the setting books for the game. The crunch can easily be ignored with them.
The last campaign I ran was using Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea, which I think is very close to AD&D 1st edition without dwarves and elves and using much better math and editing. There is however virtually nothing of the d20 SRD in this game. Perhaps my favorite version of D&D, but I still left it behind, really having had enough of that magic system.
Red Tide is possibly the best book I've ever read on the subject of creating campaign settings for actual play. It's technically for Labyrinth Lord, but only 43 out of 171 pages have any crunch on them and all of it is very easily translated to any OSR or d20 game. Half of the book is presenting the outline for a specific setting in broad strokes (and it's quite an interesting one), which the other half is about filling in the details. Either in the Red Tide setting or any other. Great book, love it very much. This one could easily have been made and released without OGL at all, simply by stating "use whatever class or spell fits best with your rules system" instead of naming one from Labyrinth Lords.
I was wondering, out of this supposedly huge pile of terrible releases, which gems have you found that you actually liked, used, and consider quite good. For practical reasons let's exclude Pathfinder here, as it has been pretty firmly established that this product line has been commercially successful and gained a huge and pretty stable following of fans.
I really quite love the Midnight setting. It's a setting that got over half a dozen of books and quite specifically meant to be played with D&D 3rd edition. It has a new magic system and prestige classes, as well as some feats and spells, but leaves all the basics to the "standard rules". Pretty much everyone who knows this setting and described it calls it "Imagine if Sauron had won." The good gods had cast the Evil God out of heaven, but had not anticipated that this violation of the cosmic order completely shut down all the borders between the different worlds and had the Evil God land in the world of mortals. With the other gods having no way to interfer in the world of mortals, he could do whatever he wanted. Which was to gather all orcs and goblins under him and conquer the rest of the world. In more detail, I've seen people describe the setting as a fantasy world modeled after Eastern Europe under Nazi occupation. There are some kind of minor witches and druids, but all clerics serve the Evil God. Really quite cool and I think the descision to make the books as addons to the D&D rulebooks was quite wise.
I am also a fan of the Conan d20 game, though I feel very ambigous about it. I think there were like 20 books or so for it, and many of them quite great. The second edition (based on 3.5e) has really excelent production values. The only real problem I have with the game is that Conan (and the Sword & Sorcery genre in general) are very unsuited for the d20 system. Or the other way round, the d20 system is a rather poor choice to make a Conan game. All the classes are a bit different and magic is very different, but under the hood it's the old thing with 20 character levels, BAB, skills, and feats.
But I very much love the setting books for the game. The crunch can easily be ignored with them.
The last campaign I ran was using Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea, which I think is very close to AD&D 1st edition without dwarves and elves and using much better math and editing. There is however virtually nothing of the d20 SRD in this game. Perhaps my favorite version of D&D, but I still left it behind, really having had enough of that magic system.
Red Tide is possibly the best book I've ever read on the subject of creating campaign settings for actual play. It's technically for Labyrinth Lord, but only 43 out of 171 pages have any crunch on them and all of it is very easily translated to any OSR or d20 game. Half of the book is presenting the outline for a specific setting in broad strokes (and it's quite an interesting one), which the other half is about filling in the details. Either in the Red Tide setting or any other. Great book, love it very much. This one could easily have been made and released without OGL at all, simply by stating "use whatever class or spell fits best with your rules system" instead of naming one from Labyrinth Lords.