Daily Archives: July 7, 2020

3.0 D&D : The Spelldancer

In my mind, I see D&D editions as a map of the same general world, scarred about with the history it lives; because no edition is really gone, and the game rules still exist and are still played (yes, even right now), it isn’t correct to see them in terms of a linear flow of time as much as regions of related space. Some are earlier, were founded before, but they are all here.

When I think of them this way, though, they take on their own character. Basic D&D seems more bucolic, smaller and older, and a space made up of its own adventures. Characters are all reasonably similar to one another, and perhaps the entirety of what Basic D&D is can fit in one valley somewhere. The First Edition is a place of broken empires, and old world lore, a place where the reality itself doesn’t quite make sense, and people must exist and coexist with the strange storybookness of how buildings stand and fall. Second edition is vast, an enormous sprawling empire of nation states scattered about, with whole nations and planes built out underneath it, subjugated and commanded even as they utter their strange national shibboleth of don’t ask about thaco.

I do not know these places, I do not know these people. I have but passed through their lands.

Then there come the spaces I know.

Fourth Edition is a nation of stout borders; bigger than it should be, perhaps, but still reasonable. It did not overstretch its means, there are no strange, raggedy places where it tried to build where it could not. What lives there makes some sense; even the most powerful and terrible of its people are still recognisable as people. They do not stand apart from one another as strange and alien. There are the Essentials places, where the rules are smaller and simpler, the buildings boxier, but broadly, it is a kingdom where the roads all run the right way and there’s no eldritch horrors lurking under the bed.

But 3.5 is right next door, and it spills out and around like a sinuous, corrupted beast. The lines of where it ends and begins are fuzzy. There’s a little extradimensional space there, between it and 3.0, where there’s a book called Ultramodern Firearms that would be disturbing if it wasn’t just really bad. There are monsters in these spaces, creatures that wreck the world just by their breathing, things where the alchemy of character construction come together and the water runs black after them. If you know them, you know them, nonsense like Punpun and the pile of Warforged cultists. Things that could hypothetically be done. Power that needed arcane rituals to make happen.

But there’s worse.

What I need you to understand is what I’m going to tell you about now is a 3.0 character option that’s probably about as broken as you can get and you can get it accidentally.

Oh yes.

We’re going to talk about the Spelldancer.

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