Okay, I never knew I needed an AD&D 2nd Edition retro-clone until I got this book. But you can get 2nd Edition softcovers! This is a hardcover. But you can play by the original rules! This is better laid out, searchable, with improvements and updates made where they were needed. It is OSR too. It has public domain art, but all of it is fantastic and eye-popping good.
And it is glorious.
This feels like the AD&D 3rd Edition we never got if D&D 3 and 3.5E never happened and they stuck with the original 2nd Edition rules and did a 2.75 version of the game.
The monster section feels a little short at 60 pages (but you get all the basics), but since it is compatible with AD&D 2's monsters (and you can get those over in print format at the DM's Guild), you have monsters - even the iconic ones if you don't mind mixing and matching FG&G and AD&D 2E books. Also, since this is OSR, pulling in any OSR monster from Labyrinth Lord or other games is trivial.
Part of me says play something modern like Castles & Crusades or Old School Essentials.
The other part of me says this is what I grew up with and what inspired me post-AD&D 1e and D&D. This is the original edition of the Forgotten Realms, back when we played that grim and gritty and it didn't get so silly with all the novels burning up places you could adventure in and immortal GMNPCs running around.
And my brother and I played that with AD&D 2nd Edition. The feeling of this game was unlike anything we ever played, it wasn't high-magic stupidity with every NPC shape changed and practically immortal. It was real. Travel was hard and deadly. Dungeons were dangerous. It had this grim OSR feeling with a sense of finality, with a dash of grand adventure. You still needed to prepare and be careful, pack those iron spikes and carry torches, but you were out there exploring and saving a world one adventure at a time.
Yes, our Realms was drastically different from the books. We skipped all the novels and 2e splatbooks. We made the world up ourselves from the original AD&D 1e gray box set. Anything mentioned there was canon. Everything else was ours to play with. There was no crisis of the gods or metaplot stuff. Elminster was just some unimportant wizard guy somewhere, like a Dumbledore honestly, and we saw him as sort of a buffoon and blowhard who stayed in his tower, kept to himself, and never changed the world. The Harpers were just a couple people somewhere.
There was no "Avengers" like group running around the world saving everyone from themselves.
The world was a grim and realistic place, but with magic and monsters.
When D&D 3E came out we felt the game turned into power gaming. We went back to Grayhawk because that explained that rules set the best in our mind, high-level invincible superheroes with piles of millions of gold.
And the Realms sort of faded away.
Nobody loved AD&D 2nd Edition anymore.
Well, that has changed today.
No comments:
Post a Comment