Augury

I dread hearing those words. Unfortunately this has happened a few times in the past few years and is happening again. One of the guys from the gaming group has decided he’s going to write his own D&D book. What invariably ends up happening with these books is that they lose focus, spiral out of control, and putter out. In the meantime the rest of us are regaled with tales of how awesome the book will be.

Our gaming group met and we ended up having nothing to do– One of the other guys who is running a D&D campaign left his materials at home. One of the other guys who is also running a campaign was missing in action. Yet another guy had been talking to me repeatedly all week about a campaign he wanted to run… But he also left the materials at home. We tossed out some suggestions.

While we considered our options I managed to get sucked into looking over prospective material for said D&D book. About a month ago I had heard the first millings-about of this book. The book was a campaign setting with the idea of being a post-apocalyptic wasteland ala Fallout or Mad Max. The races were Humans, a selection of Human-Animal Mutants, and a Robot race. My advice at the time was to figure out a theme and stick to it without adding too much extra — There’s a lot of material that needs to be included in a new campaign setting, the most important of which is, or ought to be, information about the setting.

The current iteration of the book has moved on from a selection of roughly three races. Now the setting includes Elves, Dwarves, and all the rest of your typical Fantasy races. In addition, I’ve been informed that the setting is going to use a completely new class system, all new sets of feats, a new magic system, and a whole new array of spells. “Where,” I ask, “Is all the setting information going to go?”

A beat. And then… reassurances that it’ll all fit. I just get so sick of it sometimes — Losing track of what’s important for an extra +1 to an Attack Roll. Book after book of Classes, Prestige Classes, Races, Spells, Feats, Items… Sometimes I can’t help but feel Wizards is to blame.