25 Years Ago...

Okay, Chapter 2 of this book is all about new prestige classes. Nineteen of them, in fact. Note that in all the 2000 products, there were a total of seventeen. So in one book, we've more than doubled the number of available prestige classes. A sign of things to come... So, let's run through them one a time with brief descriptions. We begin with the Cavalier. A late-addition core class in 1st edition, a kit in 2nd edition...the Cavalier is now a prestige class. He's great on a horse, of course, with most of his special abilities involving mounted combat and riding. And they are the nobility of the fantasy realm, at least most of the time. They get better Will saves than regular fighters, but you have to be a minimum of 8th level to qualify for this as the class requires a +8 base attack bonus as a prerequisite. So, this is not a class that will see much play in dungeon settings. Next is the Devoted Defender. If you ever watched The Bodyguard  with Kevin Costner and Whitney H...

 Alright, it's the first true splatbook of 3rd edition! Splatbooks became a thing in 2nd edition starting with, ironically enough, The Complete Fighter's Handbook , which introduced kits and fighting styles, in an effort to make fighters more interesting. Spoiler: It didn't really work out. All classes ended up with their own kits, and wizards always got more cool stuff than the fighters in any edition. So, this is the first opportunity for 3rd edition to show off what it can really do with an entire book devoted to helping players play fighters and monks to the fullest. The introduction to the book tells us right away that we're getting a bunch of crunchy additions, as well as some advice and fluff to help make fighters and monks more unique. But mostly crunch. In fact, the first chapter is all about new feats and new ways to use skills. In fact, there are 31 new feats in this book, many of them being fighter bonus feats (the others being monk-specific). I won't go...

I suppose this post should have been made last night while it was still 2025, but who wants to be writing blog posts on New Year's Eve? Besides, I don't have the January stuff here yet, so this is a good time to pause and reflect on what went down in the initial stages of 3rd edition D&D. Things started much earlier with the Dragon Magazine Countdown articles that ran for nearly a year before the release of the Player's Handbook  on August 10th, 2000 at GenCon. The core books came out one at a time, the Dungeon Master's Guide  releasing in September and the Monster Manual  in October. After that, there were a few additional supplements and adventures, along with, of course, the magazines: Dragon, Dungeon, and Polyhedron. And the Living Greyhawk Journal , of course. So, my initial experiences with 3rd edition actually go back to 3.5; I was one of the grognards who didn't see the need to buy a new edition when I had a perfectly good 1e/2e hybrid to work with. A fr...

I forgot about this one. This is one of the monthly free adventures WotC would post on their website. It's called The Alchemist's Eyrie , for 6th- or 7th-level characters. Once again, it's a dwarven thing. A dwarven tower, specifically, where the party is on a fetch quest. It doesn't use the Map-a-Week maps for December, though. And it turns out that the tower is currently occupied by renegade dwarves who are also...wererats. Remember in older editions where only humans could be lycanthropes? Welcome to 3rd edition, where anyone can be anything. There really isn't a lot to this adventure; as I said, it's a fetch quest. The goal is to find some medicine for a contagious illness threatening the nearby dwarven stronghold. It turns out that the dwarf who has been making the medicine is dead, killed by the wererats who are seeking a way to control the side effects of their lycanthropy. So, the party is going to be fighting some sneaky dwarves in what is a pretty stra...

Alright, this is one of the last things to review this year, which is great since I'm almost out of year. This, as a perusal of the cover will attest, is a Living Greyhawk product. Specifically, it was a free adventure dished out for everyone to use. It's not free now, of course; this sucker runs over $50 on Noble Knight games. I'll get it later. But I was able to find a PDF copy so I can review it. So, this is an adventure for four 1st-level characters. It takes place in the Theocracy of the Pale, so your clerics are going to have fun getting along with the Pholtus-worshipping people. Yeah. Plus, if you didn't live in Northern California or Nevada, you weren't actually supposed to play in the Pale. So I'm not sure how many people used this as an actual Living Greyhawk  game. For myself, I would have ignored the whole regional thing anyway. But I'm contrary that way. Anyway, on to the adventure. Actually, the first half of this 32-page module covers the syn...

So, to close out the month's Map-a-Week set, we have the Sacred Caverns . This is the last of the dwarven caverns that I didn't get a chance to populate this month. It's quite the lengthy complex, isn't it? I'm going to have to come back to this; January won't be as crazy as December was, I hope. And it will take a bit of time to actually find all the numbers; they aren't in any particular order. Those four big rooms on the top right are numbered as 1, 7, 12, and 18. So, no rhyme or reason to the numbering on this one.