Page 17 of HotFL has an “Example of Play”: pretty much the same one in the 4e PHB, except that there are mysterious differences.
The names have been changed: The DM is now named Chris and not Dave, and the other player and character names have changed as well. There are a few additions, too. I’ll quote it (keeping the old names) and bold the new text.
(more…)
Heroes of the Fallen Lands
Somehow, the image’s irregular border fools my eye into thinking it’s a more interesting setting. My brain reads the dungeon wall as a Great Wall of China-style outside wall, with a white sky above it. The two adventurers are standing before a gate, holding off undead. I imagine the walls continuing for thousands of miles in either direction, protecting – the Fallen Lands? – from a continent’s worth of undead. Now that’s a setting!
Oh, so here’s a difference between the PHB and HotFL. The PHB subtitle is “Arcane, Divine and Martial Heroes”. The HotFL’s is “Create and Play Clerics, Fighters, Rogues, and Wizards!” The HotFL subtitle has a certain something that the PHB subtitle lacks. And that certain something is an exclamation point!
It’s surprisingly strange to hold a D&D book as small as Heroes of the Fallen Lands. I’ve been reading multicolumn D&D books – either hardcover or magazine size – for more than 20 years. My brain can barely cope with the lack of an alley between columns. And there seem to be so few words per page! What would fit on one column of the PHB takes up a page of a trade paperback.
I am surprised that this makes such a difference to me. If I like large-format books so much, the logical extension is to print books on the largest possible pieces of paper – perhaps the PHB 1 should have been printed on pages the size of a foldable poster map. It’d take about thirty-five of them.
Heroes of the Fallen Lands
I walked out of the store with only “Heroes of the Fallen Lands”. And a used copy of a Gary Gygax novel, “The Samarkand Solution”. Unless there is a surprising groundswell of interest in the latter, I will liveblog only “Heroes of the Fallen Lands”.
Regrets? I have a few. Should I go back and get the dice? If I do, how can I liveblog them?
