Favourite fluff

[nerulean]

Now, as a rule, I dislike set fluff for things, everything from telling me that halflings are usually nomadic to saying that druids need to be neutral on one alignment axis. This is mostly because I dislike having my concepts for characters and worlds limited arbitrarily by an outside body who has no idea what I enjoy playing, and is partly because WotC can sometimes be very bad at it.

Every so often, though, they come up with an absolute cracker.

I love the fluff of the shadow sun ninja, a prestige class that describes a character who is struggling with his inner darkness. It's appealing, engaging and awesome in terms of roleplay, and its fluff is wonderfully represented in its crunch. Even the prestige class itself has its good bits and its bad bits. It's an absolute triumph of imagination.

So what fluff have you seen in published materials that really makes you tingle?

[Kurald Galain]

So what fluff have you seen in published materials that really makes you tingle?

Fluff in material published by WOTC? Pretty much nothing, I'm afraid. But then, playing WOD for several years kind of spoiled me on that.

[Saph]

My favourite is probably the section on elves from Races of the Wild. Several people have mentioned to me that they didn't like it, but I thought it was absolutely great. I like playing elves, and the sections on elven personality and society gave me so many ideas for my characters. I especially liked the way they deal with elven age - the PHB describes elven starting characters as 100+, but Races of the Wild explains that elves actually mature physically at about the same rate as humans - it's just that emotionally and culturally they aren't considered adults until about ninety years later. It fit with the character I was playing at the time perfectly.

- Saph

[FlyMolo]

It's kinda easy to see where they got that idea. Biologically, humans mature at what? Guys mature at 14, girls a little earlier? Something like that. You aren't considered an adult mentally until 21 here in the states.

[Fenix_of_Doom]

It's kinda easy to see where they got that idea. Biologically, humans mature at what? Guys mature at 14, girls a little earlier? Something like that. You aren't considered an adult mentally until 21 here in the states.

Guys at 14, girls earlier? that's crazy, humans just start growing fast phisicly at that age and emotially enter the fase known as puberty, that's nowhere near mature.

[Kurald Galain]

Guys at 14, girls earlier? that's crazy, humans just start growing fast phisicly at that age and emotially enter the fase known as puberty, that's nowhere near mature.

Well, nowadays they do, but if you asked a century ago, at age 14 you were considered quite mature enough to work, marry, and settle - and you had better start doing all of that, yesterday.

[Umarth]

Almost all the planescape fluff was great.

[bugsysservant]

I kind of like the Binder fluff. Not the way in which they appear, or the fact that the creatures borrow your senses, or most of the actual vestiges, but the idea of making a pact with a being that exists outside of time and space in order to give yourself inexplicable powers always seemed kind of cool to me.

Edit: of course some of that may be from reading Silver_Claw_Shift's "army of commoners" thread that was up about a month or so ago.

[bingo_bob]

Yeah, Binder is great. They managed to create a real masterpiece, there. It feels nice and heretical.

[Wordmiser]

Tome of Magic? All-in-all, thumbs up.
Core? Nothing too hot.
Completes? Nothing too hot.
Races of ___? Nothing I've seen. I've heard RotW's Raptoran section is pretty good, but I have yet to look at it.
Sandstorm/Stormwrack/Frostburn? Nothing has caught my eye yet.
Psionics and Tome of Battle? Almost offensive.

It seems that most of the interesting characters/archetypes I've seen in my group have been accomplished despite Wizards of the Coast's fluff rather than because of it.

[Xefas]

Most of the fluff in any written material is immediately scrapped by my group in favor of what'd be more fun and/or appropriate for the situation.

If someone wants to play a guy with the Psychic Warrior mechanics, but wants to be a cleric and say he gets whatever powers from his god, I'm all for it. If they want to play a vampire using the Warlock mechanics, that's fine too. An Aasimar Swordsage specializing in Desert Wind played as a devil with inborn mastery of fire? Sure.

Though, I must say, once you start blurring the distinction between a class and a race, the horrible level adjustment mechanic becomes like a giant, screaming, pus-spewing elephant in the room. As soon as you say "That's not a Human Warlock 6, that's a race of holy tree spirits that happen to have 6 racial hit dice and all the statistics of a 6th level Warlock except with different names and descriptions for their abilities" suddenly they're ECL 10 and almost unplayable.

[bosssmiley]

Almost all the planescape fluff was great.

+1. That and the Birthright setting were good; but unfortunately they're 2nd Ed. and thus not germane to this topic.

Good 3rd Ed. fluff. Hmmm...well, a couple of the Eberron sourcebooks were OK, and "Lost Empires of Faerun" was very fluff heavy (way too much Elves, not enough Imaskar or Raumathar).
(You'd think that with 2 linear feet of D&D3 books I'd be able to come up with more than that )

To be honest though, I'm still happy ganking good homebrew, porting in non-D&D fluff and - of course - rehashing stuff from TSR's mighty 2nd Ed. Golden Age of Settings.

[KIDS]

Jade Phoenix Mage. Its idea was very very original, easily adaptable, really made you tingle with new potential and the abilities represented it very well while not being over the top. Until I saw it, I never contemplated making a character based on reincarnation and cycle but now I have drawn dozens of great stories from it, and some of my characters have phoenix tattoos as a homage to the class that started it, even if they're not martial adepts.

[hippie_dwarf]

I love all of the psionics fluff, esp. the soulknife, even if it is worse than the monk. The only thing i don't like is that Half-Giants are psionic creatures, it makes absolutly no sense.

Edit: I can't stand ToB. It's great that they gave melee characters a fighting change, but the whole "I stand differently, so I can now do stuff!" just ruins it.

[Magnor Criol]

I like the stances thing; that's a bit I can understand, really. The fact that the entirety of ToB sounds like it was ripped from a cheesy Asian-imitation B movie plot ("The Sublime Way," "only nine - but legends tell of a lost tenth...," "Master Redgar blah blah he left, without aging, never to be seen again blah blah internal betrayal blah blah temple falls and everything's scattered,") is what bothers me about it. I like the mechanics and the fact that it does something to balance the classes, and many of the maneuvers are cool. But the fluff in there is so troped and so formulaic it's almost aberrant.

There's actually a good bit of fluff I enjoy, though I don't often enjoy the mechanics that they then try and use to represent that fluff. Lots of the underused classes - for instance, the Healer, Scout, or Dragon Shaman - have what I think are cool concepts, but they aren't really pulled off all that well, or in ways that really reflect their fluff, and that sorta kills the mood.

I agree about the psionic half-giants thing being irritating. That makes no sense whatsoever; I can't think of any giant in any story that was psionic for them to draw that influence from, and it's not like their giants were known for their psionics, either. It seems silly and arbitrary.

[renevq]

Two prestige classes which, although they have very different mechanics, have very similar fluff: Revenant Blade from Player's Guide to Eberron and Eternal Blade from ToB. "The power of your ancestors fuels you and turns you into a melee monster" is just too cool. Very Native American-ish.

[Drider]

Heroes of Horror (most of the fluff was at least thought provoking, to make me want to make stuff to scare them)

[Ne0]

The Half-elf and half-orc chapters from the Races of Destiny appealed to me, as well as some of the prestige classes in it, such as the Outcast Champion. Allows for some...dramatics.

[Neon Knight]

I enjoy the fluff of the hobgoblin race. Particularly the MMV material.

[Albonor]

The Blood War was a nice idea, it was more about the damage caused by letting a war be waged than about the fact that almost everytime somebody died in that conflict, it was an evil creature.

[SexyOchreJelly]

I love most of the Eberron fluff... not too restrictive while still being cool.

[Riffington]

The "Achilles sulking in his tent" reference from the Warblade.

[Benejeseret]

I love Hellbred.

Only because I was a huge Spawn comic fan.

One day I want to stat out spawn using the Hellbred (body) race. I am thinking a warlock (blasty powers could also represent various guns) with a dancing, intelligent spiked chain.

[CASTLEMIKE]

The Soul Locked template from Heroes of Horror for a recurring villain.

[Lord Lorac Silvanos]

Draconomicon and Lords of Madness.
Fiendish Codex I and to some degree also Fiendish Codex II.

[Reinboom]

Draconomicon and Lords of Madness.
Fiendish Codex I and to some degree also Fiendish Codex II.

I agree semi-completely, but, I prefer FC2 over FC1.

And must emphasize Draconomicon.
I rather enjoy the idea of dragons as catlike creatures, and I really really enjoy going into the anatomy of such. For this, I liked Draconomicon better as a read, rather than a book of mechanics.

Most fluff I prefer to change, though... not much catches my attention.

[SurlySeraph]

The fluff on Drow society.